Qualitative Psychology

A Practical Guide to Research Methods

Jonathan A. Smith, Jonathan A. Smith

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781473933408
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Undertaking qualitative research in psychology can seem like a daunting and complex process, especially when it comes to selecting the most appropriate approach for your project or assignment. This book, written and edited by a world-leading group of academics and researchers, offers an accessible, critical and practical way into qualitative research in psychology. Each chapter provides a detailed, step-by-step guide to using a qualitative research method – from Conversation Analysis or Focus Groups to Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis or Narrative Psychology. Whatever approach you choose to take, this book will ensure you get it right from the start.

New to this Third Edition:

• A chapter on Thematic Analysis
• A section on how to choose and select the most appropriate method for your project

1 Introduction

Jonathan A. Smith

We continue to witness an expansion of interest in qualitative psychology. This has marked a significant shift in a discipline which has historically emphasized the importance of quantitative methodology. This change is reflected in a range of ways: increasing numbers of undergraduate and postgraduate students in psychology conducting qualitative research projects; the growth of psychology courses teaching qualitative methodologies; the enormous increase in numbers of qualitative psychology articles appearing in peer-reviewed journals; and the development of professional sections within, for example, the American Psychological Association and the British Psychology Society to support and foster qualitative psychology.

This book aims to facilitate the further development of this active interest by offering practical guidance to those conducting qualitative research in psychology. It is written in an accessible manner and is primarily intended as a textbook for undergraduates and postgraduates, though it will also be useful to more advanced researchers. Qualitative Psychology includes major qualitative approaches now used in psychology, and each chapter offers the reader a step-by-step guide to carrying out research using that particular method.

What is qualitative psychology? A dictionary definition might suggest that qualitative analysis is concerned with describing the constituent properties of an entity, while quantitative analysis is involved in determining how much of the entity there is. Indeed, much psychological research reflects the essence of that distinction. A great deal of qualitative research aims to provide rich or ‘thick’ (Geertz, 1973) descriptive accounts of the phenomenon under investigation, while quantitative research is more generally concerned with counting occurrences, volumes, or the size of associations between entities.

Qualitative and quantitative approaches clearly differ in terms of how the data are analysed. Quantitative research requires the reduction of phenomena to numerical values in order to carry out statistical analyses. Thus, although much quantitative research begins with verbal data – for example, answers to questionnaire items – the nature of the response is prescribed by the need for quantitative analysis, and this verbal material must be transformed into numbers for that quantitative analysis to be carried out.

By contrast, qualitative research involves collecting data in the form of naturalistic verbal reports – for example, interview transcripts or written accounts – and the analysis conducted on these is textual. Thus, the concern is with interpreting what a piece of text means rather than finding the numerical properties of it. The interpretation is then conveyed through detailed narrative reports of participants’ perceptions, understandings or accounts of a phenomenon. For most qualitative researchers, this approach is consonant with a theoretical commitment to the importance of language as a fundamental property of human communication, interpretation and understanding. Given that we tend to make sense of our social world and express that sense-making to ourselves and others linguistically, qualitative researchers emphasize the value of analytic strategies that remain as close as possible to the symbolic system in which that sense-making occurs.

Qualitative approaches in psychology are generally engaged with exploring, describing and interpreting the personal and social experiences of participants. An attempt is usually made to understand a relatively small number of participants’ own frames of reference or view of the world rather than trying to test a preconceived hypothesis on a large sample. For some qualitative researchers, the primary emphasis lies in how meanings are constructed and shaped discursively. Of course, there is a major theoretical underpinning to qualitative research; and the historical context of, and main themes in, that theoretical nexus are covered by Peter Ashworth in Chapter 2 of this book.

While it is true that qualitative and quantitative research projects usually differ considerably in terms of research question, orientation and execution, it is actually difficult to make categorical distinctions between qualitative and quantitative methods. Thus, for example, some quantitative researchers produce descriptive statistical accounts, and some qualitative researchers seek causal relationships. Similarly, Hayes (1997) argues that the process of analysis in qualitative research often invokes quantitative properties, as researchers make judgements, implicitly or explicitly, of the strength or otherwise of a category or property being reported, and individuals are compared with each other on various dimensions. Moreover, one can argue that quantitative research always involves interpretation by the researcher and that this process is essentially a qualitative one. So, while this book is written with a recognition of and commitment to qualitative research as a distinctive approach to psychological inquiry, it recognizes that the difference is not as categorical as sometimes portrayed.

It is also the case that qualitative psychology is not a homogeneous entity. There are a number of different approaches, each with overlapping but different theoretical and/or methodological emphases. And the growth of qualitative psychology has meant that recognizing this is increasingly important. Students need to know which particular type of qualitative method they are reading or working with, what its theoretical commitments are, and how it differs from other qualitative approaches they might encounter. So, for example, interpretative phenomenological analysis is concerned with exploring the lived experience of the participant or with understanding how participants make sense of their personal and social world. On the other hand, discourse analysis and conversation analysis are concerned with describing the linguistic resources participants draw on during conversations, the patterns those conversations take, and the social interactional work being performed during them.

This book aims to help the reader navigate through these different perspectives and procedures. The intention is for the reader new to, but curious about, qualitative psychology to learn about the different qualitative approaches in terms of both their underlying theoretical assumptions and their practical procedures. Each chapter offers a short theoretical introduction to the approach and then offers a step-by-step guide to conducting psychological research by that method. The contributors are all recognized international experts; indeed, many of them are key figures in either the inception or development of their approach, and each has extensive experience using, teaching and writing about it. At the same time, the aim has been for the chapters to be written in an accessible fashion so that newcomers to the field can understand the main features of the particular method and be encouraged to try it out for themselves. Helping to set the scene for those practical chapters, the book begins with a chapter by Peter Ashworth outlining the conceptual foundations of qualitative psychology and their connection with the contemporary field. While qualitative psychology as a vibrant empirical force is relatively new, it actually has a long and distinguished intellectual history, and Peter Ashworth provides an entry to, and overview of, that history, as well as a link to the approaches offered in the rest of the book.

2 Conceptual Foundations of Qualitative Psychology

Peter Ashworth

In this chapter, I want to point to the gradual unfolding in the history of psychology of certain ways of thinking which have, relatively recently, led to the emergence of specifically qualitative approaches to psychological matters. For, behind the use of qualitative methods lies a set of distinct conceptions of the nature of human psychology, and I will outline here some of the sources of these conceptions.

There are several different approaches to qualitative psychology, as the chapters in this book testify, but underlying each approach is a concern to uncover people’s grasp of their world. I use that ungainly term ‘grasp of their world’ to avoid terminology which would be unacceptable to one or other of the traditions within qualitative psychology. There are important differences in opinion about how the subject matter of qualitative research should be conceptualized.

First, the ‘qualities’ sought in elucidating a person’s grasp of their world may be seen as a system of objective variables. For some, qualitative research aims at discovering the variables entailed in some human situation and does not dissent from the orthodox view of the person as being part of a natural system of causes and effects (in the positivist manner). Such an approach is not the focus of this book, though it is not unusual in, for example, using a qualitative investigation as part of the process of designing the questionnaire which will later be used as part of an experimental study.

Second, the person’s grasp of their world may be conceptualized as a set of quasi- linguistic propositions (which may or may not be seen as open to personal choice) by which the person construes or constructs their world. Such qualitative psychologists often turn their attention to the range of social interpretations of events available to a person, arguing that these interpretations are what gives form and content to the individual’s grasp of their world (gender, for instance, being ready-packaged for us in particular ways). These authors are likely to shy away from the use of terms like ‘experience’, feeling that it points too much to the individual; what should be studied, instead, is the social nature of the constructions of the world that guide thought and action.

Third, qualitative psychologists may envisage the person’s grasp of their world in terms of ‘perceptions’ or meanings (whether socially shared or idiosyncratic). This is a major aspect of the phenomenological viewpoint, in which qualitative researchers often speak of the personal ‘lifeworld’, and try to describe an individual’s experience within this particular meaningful realm.

In the latter two types of qualitative study, qualitative psychology does not make discoveries of precisely the kind experimental psychology seeks – finding new causal factors in human behaviour or refining our understanding of known effects. Instead, what we discover in qualitative psychology are the taken-for-granted meanings by which we grasp our world. Bringing these to explicit awareness can allow us to be less perplexed about ourselves (this is the primary objective). However, as the first of the approaches to qualitative research listed above indicates, qualitative methods can also provide evidence of importance to experimental psychology in helping setting up causal models which remain connected to lived experience. So quantitative and qualitative methods may be combined in various ways in ‘mixed mode’ research (Todd et al., 2004).

The Birth of Psychology and the Question of ‘Experience’

Within contemporary psychology, then, those who wish to investigate the person’s grasp of their world in detail will tend to turn to qualitative methods. A concentration on human experience as the central topic of psychology or a focus on construction orinterpretation seems, for us, to lead, almost inevitably to qualitative research. Yet the history of psychology does not show a necessary link between the study of experience and qualitative methodology. It is sometimes forgotten that, when experimental psychology was founded in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was defined as the science of experience, and – maybe surprisingly – the methodology replicated as far as was possible that of the physical sciences. The philosophers and physiologists who began to establish psychology as a discipline had seen the immensely impressive strides in understanding the nature of the external world made by the physical sciences. Psychology would complement this by developing a scientific understanding of the ‘inner world’ of experience, and this inner realm would be approached experimentally and quantitatively. The major interest of those early experimentalists, in fact, was in discovering what precisely the relationship was between the outer world and the inner world.

Gustav Fechner (1801–1887), for example, aimed to discover the laws relating the physical nature of an external physical stimulus to the internal experience of the sensation it produced. Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik (1860/1966) could indeed be said to be the founding publication of experimental psychology. In it, Fechner reported his findings regarding such matters as the relationship between stimulus and sensation. For instance, a measured change in the intensity of light would be compared with the extent to which the person’s experience of brightness altered. So variations in objective physical energy could be graphed against variations in the subjective sensation of brightness. The brightness of light is, in a certain sense, an experience.

The limitations of Fechner’s psychophysics, from the point of view of contemporary qualitative psychology, are rather obvious. What was the meaning of ‘experience’ in experimental work such as Fechner’s? It was simply the individual report of some aspect of a sensation. But we might well object that the experience of variations in brightness was within a very specific, controlled context, with a particular social meaning (the research participants lived in a culture and historical epoch in which it made sense to play the role of ‘research subject’ and to turn attention exclusively to the specified aspect of the sensation). We might wonder about the vocabulary available to the participants for reporting visual sensation. We might inquire about the relations of power between experimenter and subject. We might speculate about the perceived passage of time during these possibly tedious sessions. But these wider aspects of the experience in the round were of no interest to Fechner.

Right at the start, there was scientific controversy surrounding Fechner’s book. Some of it was aimed at the details of the methodology. But William James was one of the distinguished psychologists who regarded the whole enterprise of ‘psychophysics’ as completely without value.

The human capacity to report verbally on sensations of the elementary kind investigated by Fechner (‘Which light is brighter?’ ‘The one on the left.’) could, it seems, appear unproblematic given the restricted focus of interest of the experimental investigation. When later investigators developed psychological studies which had more complex aims, the difficulties of the approach adopted by Fechner became increasingly insistent. A more elaborate attempt at the analysis of experience is found in Wundt’s Physiologische Psychologie (1874/1904), in which various novel methods were used, but notably Wundt focused on laboratory investigation using trained and systematic self-observation. While systematic in the extreme and subject to careful experimental control, the method nevertheless depended on the research participants’ verbal report of their (a question-begging term) introspections. The accounts of the structure of experience varied between laboratories as Wundt’s approach began to be adopted by other workers in the new science.

It was not only because of the unreliability of the experimental self-observation method when applied to the description of the make-up of consciousness that Wundt’s work on the structure of immediate experience was challenged. In particular, Franz Brentano (1838–1917) developed a quite different approach to immediate experience. He viewed conscious experience as a process; experiencing was an act, so that different kinds of experience are to be distinguished by the particular way in which we gain consciousness of the object of experience. In particular, the ‘kind’ of conscious act involved in relating ourselves to something so as to form a judgement about it is different from the conscious act by which we achieve a perception of something. So judgement and perception and other modes of conscious experience involve different orientations to the object.

The key feature of conscious activity, for Brentano (1874) (and this was taken up by Husserl and the phenomenologists), was its intentionality, a technical term pointing to the intrinsic ‘relatedness’ of consciousness to the object of its attention. The fact that consciousness uniquely has this attribute of intentionality was definitive, that is, all consciousness is consciousness of something. And psychology, for Brentano, had the task of delineating the various ways in which consciousness could relate to its objects.

Brentano’s act psychology did not gain a significant hearing outside Germany, though it had an impact on Gestalt theory. The psychology of Wundt, with its technique of self-observation and focus on mental content, gave way to functionalism and especially its behaviourist form in the Anglo-American world. But in the mean...