Using the Pictor technique to reflect on collaborative working in undergraduate nursing and midwifery placements

Pictor is a visual technique for exploring episodes of collaborative working, and has been developed for use in health care research at the Centre for Applied Psychological Research at the University of Huddersfield. This thesis explores whether the technique could usefully translate into a tool for reflection for students of nursing and midwifery, investigating how the features of the technique facilitate reflection, how students evaluate the technique, and how talk elicited using Pictor might dovetail with existing models of reflection. Findings indicate that Pictor facilitates in-depth talk about care and collaboration focused around patients (nursing) and women in labour (midwifery), including the discomforts of learning to be a practitioner, how the challenges of practice are met, and how reflection works for students on-the-ground during their placement experiences. Students found the technique easy and enjoyable to use. Implications of the research include Pictor's possible use as a tool for individual and group reflection, eliciting thinking which meets the same criteria as existing written models of reflection, and suggest the potential for a secondary analysis of the interview data with a view to making links with traditional taxonomies of learning.