As the concluding article of this issue, the current work describes and explaining the various Aspects of psychological practice during Covid-19 pandemic in Israel in the summer and fall of 2020, from the perspective of practitioners specializing in different areas of psychology, who have participated in this issue.
Methodology
After I decided that my summary to the issue will be a phenomenological study, all the articles and video interviews in this issue were subjected to content analysis using a grounded theory’ approach (Glazer & Strauss, 2017). The data were divided into categories and then classified into themes. The themes are presented in the next section, followed by a simple grounded theory model that describes and explains the various aspects of practicing psychology in Israel in the times of the Covid-19 pandemic and the relations among the themes, as represented in the materials appearing in this issue. This issue includes three articles and eight interviews, including an interview with two practitioners – all in all, 12 authors and interviewees, to whom I refer in this study as participants.
The 12 practitioners who took part in this study have active practices in different fields of psychology. Participants included practitioners with a background in clinical psychology, educational psychology, medical psychology, art therapy, social work, education, group therapy, family and couple therapy, biblio-therapy, and animal-assisted therapy. All have experience with the Professional School of Psychology (PSP): one is a lecturer and supervisor and 11 are Psy.D. graduates. All were invited contributed an article to this issue of Future Professional Psychology or were interviewed by me on Zoom. Interviews were edited into short videos of about 15 min each and are presented in this issue. In this study I used eight abbreviated videos and three articles, which all appear in this issue. Participants gave their consent to publish their interview and/or article.
Results and Discussion
This section presents the main aspects of psychological practice in Israel during the Covid-19 pandemic, as reflected in all the materials featured in this issue. All the data were analyzed as described above and seven main themes were identified. All the themes are illustrated by excerpts from the articles and interviews. This chapter concludes with a grounded theory model that summarizes the themes that emerged from the materials and highlights the relationships among them.
The Covid-19 Experience
The first theme, the Covid-19 experience, encompasses the emotional experiences that participants describe in this issue. As you can see from the conceptual framework introduced above, the professional literature emphasizes the fear, anxiety, and stress that are caused by the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g., Asmundson & Taylor, 2020a; Kumar & Nayar, 2020; Mertens, et al., 2020). The participants in this study, however, described a much broader range of emotions. While the Covid-19 experience is described differently by the contributors of this issue, their experiences included an element of surprise and multiple unfamiliar — and not necessarily unfavorable — components. Orit described this point well:
