The professional development of educational practitioners is a subject that is studied internationally and for which different theoretical frameworks and methodologies are used. There are various proposals for categorizing the successive stages through which an educational practitioner passes during his/her professional development (Fessler, 1985; Huberman, 1989; Marchesi, 2007). Although there are differences between the authors, they all agree on the existence of an early stage with its own entity: the professional induction. The initial period of learning a profession is a key phase and it can have an important impact on the future of education professionals (Liston et al, 2006; Veenman, 1984). The first years in the profession are crucial for the development of a professional identity (Day, 2004; Sachs, 2001), that is, for the progressive construction of meanings about oneself as a professional.

Following the proposals of socio-cultural theories, we define the professional identity as a set of provisional and changing meanings about the professional self. It is negotiated in situated interactions with others and it is the result of the meanings given by culture and by the individual (Bruner, 2006). We assume that professional identity is deployed and constructed through the participation of a professional in discursive practices (Davies and Harré, 1990) which take place in a set of communities of practice (CofP) (Lave& Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). The meanings that a novice professional builds about him/herself are strongly influenced by the habitual positioning (Wortham, 2001) that s/he adopts and by the way in which s/he narrates his own experience (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999; Bolívar, 2002).

In recent years, professional identity has especially been investigated through interviews and questionnaires. After a review of recent research on professional identity, Beijaard, Meijer & Verloop (2004), have pointed out that more attention needs to be paid to the role of the context in professional identity, and that researchers should use structured and open methods to investigate this construct. A conceptualization of professional identity that makes reference to its dynamic, changing, social, contextualized and situated character needs a methodology to study it in all its complexity. The research question of this paper is: How can we study the construction of the professional identity of a novice practitioner? The main objective of this paper is to show a research design to study the configuration of the professional identity of a novice school psychologist, which is consistent with the way in which we have described identity in theoretical terms. Since the research is currently being conducted, another objective of this paper is to illustrate how this approach contributes to the study of professional identity, and its advantages and disadvantages compared to other methodologies.

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