Using qualitative methodology to explore the feeling of certainty in the clinical intuition of the clinical psychologist

Our proposal is to show how a combined qualitative methodology can shed light on the feeling of clinical certainty in the choice of a verbal intervention for clinical psychologist in clinical interview situation. What we call 'clinical certainty' is what every therapist have already experienced, a kind of feeling of evidence about what we should respond to the patient during the interview, a feeling which seems to have suddenly appeared to our consciousness. We have conducted a research to explore this micro-moment of the therapeutic process at the crossroads between clinical reasoning and clinical intuition.
Aim: to show how this feeling of clinical certainty is constructed.
Background: our work is rooted in a phenomenologically inspired paradigm.
Method: we chose a first-person method to get to the heart of the subjective experience of the therapists. We used video feedback and explicitation interview to access the therapists' non-conscious knowledge.
Results: the feeling of clinical certainty was born below the threshold of consciousness. We also discovered that clinical certainty was essentially constructed in a sensory dimension and in an experiential perspective in the constructivist sense of the term. Furthermore, we showed that our methodology could be used as a supervisory tool to improve therapists' practice.