Intro to qualitative research

Question 1

When did psychology first emerge?

Answer 1

1879-1916

Holistic approaches introduced

Question 2

What is Volkerpsychologie

Answer 2

Wundt’s cultural-historical approach to studying human life

Question 3

Forgotten founders

Answer 3

Freud’s investigations into dreams.

Gestalt psychologists on perception.

Piaget’s interviews with children.

William James’ studies of religious experience.

Maslow’s studies of self-actualized personality.

Question 4

When did psychology develop after its emergence? What was it called?

Answer 4

1942 Allport report
1954 Critical Incident Technique (CIT) - first qual method

Marginalisation of psych

Question 5

Describe the social science research report in 1942?

Answer 5

Gordon Allport tasked to investigate psychological research focused on ‘the subjective factor’

Question 6

What issues did this address?

Answer 6

• Use of ‘first-person materials’ like interviews, autobiographies, diaries, questionnaires, artistic productions,etc

Question 7

What was the main finding?

Answer 7

Main finding was that although such material were used with great skill, brilliance and results in psychology, there was little formal methodological concern. (didnt have strict methodological standards and wasnt formalised)

Question 8

What 3 recommendations did Allport make?

Answer 8

1. Psychologists should continue to employ these methods in bold and radical ways.
2. Critical and ethical evaluation of these methods could address issues of sampling and validity.
3. Strong countermeasures should be taken against psychologists who condemn the use of such methods or require they be used merely in the service of generating hypotheses for quantitative tests.

Question 9

When did re-emergence of psych occur? which subset of psychology began to rise?

Answer 9

1) 1967 - Discovery of grounded theory
1970s Descriptive phenomenology (Giorgi)
1980s - Discourse analysis

Descriptive phenomenology and Discourse analysis related to turn to lived experience and turn to language

2) cognitive

Question 10

The phenomenological turn in psychology

Answer 10

Psychology became a science by grounding itself in the conscious world of our everyday lived experience (Husserl, 1936/1981).

The aim of psychology as a science of the phenomenon is to describe and understand the conscious world (Giorgi, 2009; Smith et al., 2009).

So if this is the case, psych can’t therefore merely imitate the experimental methods of natural science, need diff methods

Question 11

Natural vs Human sciences

Answer 11

natural = explain nature

human = understand historical and cultural human life through a form of objective and reliable interpretation (Wilhelm Dilthey)

Question 12

The linguistic turn in psych

Answer 12

In The Explanation of Social Behaviour, Harré and Secord (1972) argued that explanations of human action need reference to socially situated purposes, which are expressed in ordinary language.

Focus on the content, structure and performance of language.

Represents a conceptual break from mainstream experimental psychology (Parker, 2015): meaning rather than behaviour; interpretation rather than explanation.

Question 13

What two main frameworks emerged from the linguistic turn (Potter and Wetherell 1987, Parker 2015)?

Answer 13

Discursive psychology: how people use language in particular social environments.

Critical discourse analysis: how controlling metaphors, notions, categories and norms shape interaction and relations.

Question 14

Institutionalization of qual research?

Answer 14

1990s Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)(Smith et al.)

2005 Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section

Question 15

what did the institutionalization do?

Answer 15

Answering Allport’s 1942 call to systematize qualitative research in psychology.

An attempt to integrate qualitative and quantitative research – ‘mixed-methods’.

An emerging pluralism in psychology, which is finally filtering into university curricula.

Question 16

What’s the ‘McDonaldization’ of qualitative research?

Answer 16

This institutionalization is not without risk.

McDonaldization (Ritzer, 2008):
Efficiency
Calculability
Predictability
Control.

We should understand others by spending time with and talking to them – there is no strict methodological formula for this.

Question 17

When did Politicized psych come?

Answer 17

2010s

Question 18

What’s postcolonial psych?

Answer 18

The cultures, beliefs and values that shape the everyday experiences of people in the global south emerge from alternative knowledge systems and form a large part of how individuals and communities interpret their existence and determine their behaviour (Kessi & Kiguwa, 2015).

Question 19

Liberation Psychology?

Answer 19

An approach that addresses social inequalities both in theory and practical application.
Founded by Ignacio Martín-Baró in 1970s Latin America.

Question 20

Critical Psychology

Answer 20

Fostering a political activist attitude to qualitative research.

Question 21

what’s the Hypothetico-deductive method?

Answer 21

hypothetico -Following our observations, we produce a generalised explanation (theory).

Based upon that we can provide a generalised statement about the world (a hypothesis).

deductive - We can then produce a research prediction…

… and then test theory

Question 22

problem with the name hypothetico deductive method? What new name instead?

Answer 22

The hypothetico-deductive method that underpins experimental psychology is a bit misleading, because:

“unmentioned in the name of the [hypothetico-deductive] method is a crucial third part in which the consequences are … compared with experiment or what we can observe… so a better name might be the hypothetico-inferential method.”

Question 23

Is the H-P method only in science?

Answer 23

Qualitative methods are an excellent way to generate hypotheses.

The hypothetico-inferential method is not special to science. It is also a model we use everyday.

Question 24

So what makes psychology (and any other discipline) scientific?

Answer 24

Scientific knowledge differs from other kinds of knowledge, especially from everyday knowledge, by its higher degree of systematicity”.
(Hoyningen-Huene, 2008, p. 169)

Question 25

4 problems with psych as merely an experimental science

Answer 25

1. THE REFLEXIVE CIRCLE
2. METHODOLOGISM
3. . ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY
4. FALSE NEUTRALITY

Question 26

the reflexive circle

Answer 26

When we study psychology we study ourselves – we are both the subjects and objects of research. New knowledge changes the very subject matter of the knowledge itself (Smith, 2013).

Looping effects of human kinds (Hacking

Question 27

METHODOLOGISM

Answer 27

Unnecessary focus on the experimental methods of psychological inquiry, rather than the subject matter (Teo, 2009).

Question 28

ecologcial validity

Answer 28

The experimental psychology-of-variables approach becomes especially problematic when we attempt to interpret results outside the laboratory…

“Psychologists… did not just simplify social relations in order to study them empirically but created a new kind of social relationship – the person in the laboratory.”

Question 29

false neutrality

Answer 29

Adopting an experimental ‘objective’ method but not questioning the assumptions that prefigure the use of such a method (Fox et al., 2009; Parker, 2007).

Social psychologist Michael Billig (2013) has suggested that in explicitly trying to adopt the position of ‘objective scientists’, psychologists often use practices that obscure rather than explicate findings…

Question 30

Key concepts in qualitative research?

Answer 30

- contextual
generative
reflexive
Fallibilistic
Concerned with meaning and subjectivity
Focused on interpretation rather than explanation

Question 31

recap

Answer 31

Although quantitative approaches have historically dominated psychology as a discipline, there is also a rich history of qualitative approaches.

Qualitative approaches are an integral part of the hyothetico-infererential method that underpins experimental psychology.

But… other ways of knowing can also be systematic and qualitative methods can also be used in these ways.