Door de bomen het bos leren zien – en door het bos de bomen: Het Nederlandse Case Studies Project Geestelijke Verzorging

Learning to see the forest for the trees and the trees for the forest: the Dutch Case Studies Project in Chaplaincy

Chaplaincy/spiritual care is a young profession whose multiple and multicolored practice has so far hardly been explored and analyzed through empirical research. In our research, we have partly mapped the practice using case studies. In doing so, we made a number of methodological choices, such as soliciting case studies of care practices in various fields of chaplaincy, attending to context, requesting member checks, working in research communities with a detailed format for the case studies, all in a four-year process. We offer here a motivation for our methodological choices, followed by an evaluation. A common thread running through the choices and evaluation is the tension between the concreteness of the practices and general definitions of what chaplaincy/spiritual care is.