The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology

Carla Willig, Wendy Stainton Rogers, Carla Willig, Wendy Stainton Rogers

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526422842
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Research & Methodology in Psychology

One of our bestselling handbooks, The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology, is back for a second edition. Since the first edition qualitative research in psychology has been transformed. Responding to this, existing chapters have been updated, and three new chapters introduced on Thematic Analysis, Interpretation and Netnography. With a focus on methodological progress throughout, the chapters are organised into three sections: Section One: Methods
Section Two: Perspectives and Techniques
Section Three: Applications In the field of psychology and beyond, this handbook will constitute a valuable resource for both experienced qualitative researchers and novices for many years to come.

1 Introduction

Wendy Stainton Rogers

Carla Willig

In this second edition of the Handbook we celebrate the amazing diversity and reach of qualitative research in psychology, its burgeoning innovations and its growing capacity to influence policy, practice and activism. Moving on from the first edition, we continue to witness a process of expansion of qualitative research going on in psychology, and growing recognition of its merits and usefulness – even in the USA where psychology's establishment had for so long been dismissive towards it. Elsewhere, including in Australasia, Europe, Canada, South America and South Africa – but especially in the UK – qualitative research has been growing for fifty years.

In the UK, for example, qualitative methods are increasingly being integrated into the curriculum. UK funding bodies (such as the Economic and Social Research Council) now increasingly favour research proposals which use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. UK Government sponsored bodies (such as NICE – the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence which makes recommendations for policy and practice) have become much more willing to consider evidence based on qualitative research in fields like public health. Indeed, in the health and social care field we are now seeing a growth in the use of metasynthesis techniques, where qualitative data and interpretation from a number of different qualitative studies are brought together to provide evidence useful for informing practice and theory, and, indeed activism.

Notable progress has been made in the last ten years in the amount and quality of qualitative research in psychology that is being published (Gough and Lyons, 2015, provide an excellent review of recent developments). It is also evident that both undergraduate and higher degree students in psychology are becoming more and more likely to want to use qualitative methods for their dissertations. This raises problems, however, as there is currently a lack of systematic and effective training available to those seeking to conduct qualitative research projects – training that properly encompasses its epistemology, its purpose, its theory, its methods and skills (see Breen and Darlaston-Jones, 2010). No longer can qualitative methods be treated as an abbreviated ‘add-on’ to the traditional ‘research methods’ curriculum, if it is to be done with appropriate rigour and insight. In particular, the skills, tasks and insight required to introduce appropriate reflexivity into research designs need to be included, not just in practical terms but in respect to the particular ethical issues arising when conducting qualitative studies (Gough and Madill, 2012; Gough and Deatrick, 2015).

Even despite this serious gap in training, it continues to be the case that more qualitative research is being published (Gough and Lyons, 2015). More new journals have been established since the first edition of the Handbook was published – and some notable ones, at that. Following Qualitative Research in Psychology (QRiP) being established in the UK by the British Psychological Society (BPS) in 2003, in 2013 the American Psychological Association (APA) established its journal, Qualitative Psychology. Given how hostile so many US psychologists have been, historically, to qualitative methods, this was a real breakthrough and will undoubtedly have a considerable impact, opening up the acceptability of and knowledge about such work globally. Effective dissemination matters, and both associations now run dedicated conferences: the BPS Qualitative Section has biannual ones (with other events in between); the APA qualitative group now meet annually, providing for the key discussions needed.

It is worth noting that within certain fields of psychology, their subdiscipline conferences have had, for some considerable time now, qualitative research and theory dominating the programme. Examples include the BPS Psychology of Women (PoW) annual conference, starting in 1991; and the International Society for Critical Health Psychology (ISCHP) that has been holding biannual conferences since 1999. Both are designed to specifically encourage and support students, early-career academic researchers and, indeed, activists and practitioners, whose active participation is positively encouraged. Both, alongside the BPS Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section journal and conferences, are very open to innovative research methods and strategies, and to alternative ways of communicating, such as PechaKucha (Japanese for chit-chat, a short presentation of 20 slides, each shown for 20 seconds alongside a commentary), art exhibitions and films. The focus is less on simply reporting studies and more on stimulating debate and discussion.

Not only is more qualitative work thus being promulgated, academics who are active in the qualitative field have been ‘brought in from the cold'. Established journals like the British Journal of Social Psychology and the Journal of Health Psychology are building up greater numbers of qualitative psychologists on their editorial boards. Most notably, Feminism & Psychology has, since its inception, had an editorial board consisting of mainly qualitative researchers and has a policy of encouraging qualitative research. Furthermore, the APA journal the Psychology of Men & Masculinity specifically recruited Brendan Gough, Editor of QRiP, as an Associate Editor to attract more qualitative papers. A number of psychology journals have recently devoted whole editions to qualitative work, guest edited by qualitative researchers and usually devoted to a particular field or approach (e.g. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology in 2000: 9(4), Canadian Psychology in 2002: 43(3), the Journal of Counseling Psychology in 2005: 52(2) and Health Psychology, in 2015: 34(4)).

Nobody is claiming that the dominance of quantitative research is threatened by immanent overthrow. As the status quo, it continues to permeate psychology's regulatory frameworks, student grading and research funding decisions, albeit, in some locations, somewhat less dogmatically than it did before. The ‘physics envy’ of psychology's establishment continues to rule. But, in our 2008 edition we noted that something was stirring, and hence it was an ideal time for the handbook to appear. This is even more the case in 2017, as the stirring has been, in some places, more productive.

Once more the Handbook has provided us, as its editors, with a fascinating and rewarding opportunity to trace its further trajectory into the future. Its updated version, we hope, retains the rich knowledge base and other features of the original, while presenting an ideal opportunity to identify new, fascinating and sophisticated debates, new insights into history and their implications for future developments, and to map how qualitative perspectives have been accommodated and operationalized across the various and expanding sub-disciplines of psychology and beyond. As qualitative psychologists we are contributing to far more interdisciplinary ventures and we will return to this later.

About the Handbook

As we found as editors of the earlier edition, there is not a lot of agreement about what kind of ‘beast’ a handbook actually is! A good place to start may well be what it is not. Certainly an academic handbook like this one is not like a manual for a car or a washing machine – lots of ‘how to get it up-and-running’ information together with advice for troubleshooting when the various bits go wrong. It is more conceptual and contextual than that. But neither, we were determined, should it be an off-puttingly erudite collection of obscure technical, speculative or rhetorical articles intended only for elite in-groups preoccupied with teasing out the more arcane or procedural minutiae of this or that methodology (or its application). Thankfully for all of us, it is much more down to earth than that.

A handbook like this is designed to be useful, especially to those with an interest (either in qualitative research in psychology generally, or in a specific method or field more precisely) but who come to it with limited prior knowledge or understanding. It is more of a ‘get-to-know-you’ device, an up-to-date map of qualitative research methods in psychology in the early twenty-first century. It is all about what these methods are; how they do (and do not) fit together; how and where they are being used (and by whom, for what); and in what ways some key, overarching positions and standpoints (such as ethics, feminism and post-colonialism) frame, and are framed by, the qualitative research agenda in psychology. Our aim has been for the map to be rich in its coverage, reviewing, reasonably comprehensively, the wide diversity of approaches to qualitative research in psychology that have been developed over the years. To do so we have added two chapters, lost one and replaced one. All of the chapters have been brought thoroughly up to date. These chapters also explore how and why the various approaches have been brought into play...