Conference report – 1st European Mentoring and Coaching Council Research Conference, University of Twente, The Netherlands, 7-8 July 2011
The coaching and mentoring community needs more research that looks in the “black box” of relationships, said David Megginson, of Sheffield Hallam University.
Mentoring research has tended to be from the positivist tradition, which relies on observable facts and on statistics and large samples.
He said: “This incuriosity in relationships…gives a preponderance to what can be counted, often just offering a snapshot.
“We need more longitudinal studies where people are contacted before, during and after interventions. We need to look in the black box otherwise we are denying the richness.
“Many studies just look at collecting views of coaches or clients but not anyone else such as colleagues or bosses. For me the best way to look inside the black box is to ask the people concerned, as Erik de Haan has done. This represents a useful direction.”
Videos of trainee coaches’ sessions with clients could be another way to look inside the black box, he said.
Megginson discussed the historically different research traditions in coaching and mentoring, drawing on 18 examples. The focus in mentoring research papers has tended to be on supporting people who have been disadvantaged in employment. Its language has been bound up with the high standards demanded by US journals, requiring the research to be grounded in theoretical frameworks such as attachment theory.
“The expectation is not just to do mentoring research but to use lenses of other theories,” he noted.
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 5