Descriptions of Female Solution Focused Practitioners’ Practice: A Reflexive Thematic Analysis of Written Narratives

This qualitative study explored how female Solution Focused practitioners describe their therapeutic practice within written narratives. While existing Solution Focused research has largely focused on client outcomes and intervention effectiveness, limited attention has been given to how therapists themselves understand and describe their own practice, particularly female practitioners. Drawing on narratives published in Women’s Perspectives on the Solution Focused Approach (2024), the research analysed written responses from 17 female practitioners across 15 countries using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. The findings illustrate Solution Focused practice as a dynamic, embodied, relational, and recursively constructed orientation that extends beyond methods and techniques and is practiced intra-relatedly across four dimensions. BEING emerged as the ethical and relational dimension of practice, characterised by hope, curiosity, respect, responsiveness, transparency and collaboration. Solution Focused practice and actions were co-constructed through language, relationship building, and engagement that is purposefully oriented toward change and possibility; and were all included in the DOING dimension. The CONTEXT dimension highlighted practitioners’ creative and contextually responsive adaptation of Solution Focused work across diverse settings to align with the client; while TIME revealed a dimension of practice as an ongoing developmental process through which practitioners internalised Solution Focused principles in both professional and personal domains. The research study presents the “Solution Focused DNA Model of Practice”, conceptualising practice as a recursive intra-action between the dimensions of BEING, DOING, CONTEXT and TIME, while foregrounding the under-represented perspectives of female practitioners within Solution Focused and psychotherapy literature.