Reading qualitative research

In recent years, qualitative research has emerged as an increasingly significant source of evidence for counselling and psychotherapy policy and practice. As a result, it is important for readers of qualitative studies to develop an appreciation of what kind of knowledge is made available, and not available, through this form of inquiry. The present paper offers a critical reflection on a series of qualitative studies published in the current issue of this journal. From a reader perspective, it is possible to identify a set of key themes: the capacity of qualitative research to address major issues within the field; contrasts between professional knowledge and other sources of evidence; the positionality of the author; the challenges associated with the accomplishment of contextuality; and, the struggle to determine the credibility and reliability of findings. The paper concludes by suggesting a shift in publication practice that might enhance the value and readability of qualitative articles.     

Traveling Without a Destination? A Dialogical Analysis of Professional Identity Construction Among Australian Double Degree Psychology Students

This paper presents findings from a study of Australian double degree psychology students’ construction of professional identity. Dialogical self theory was used as a framework to conceptualize professional identity construction and to identify the I-positions, the voices of others, and the relationships between these voices within the self. Results revealed that conflicting voices were heard within the self, creating tensions in students’ professional identification. Moreover, it seems that when trying to navigate their study journeys, students rely on several, sometimes unintentional, value orientations to assist them in moving forward from these struggles. Findings are considered in the context of further developing dialogical self theory and the enhancement of curricula that focus on multiprofessional and interdisciplinary learning and teaching.     

Contingent Resistances Methodology: Analyzing Resistance in Parents' and Daughters' Choice of an All‐Girl Middle School

Contemporary perspectives on dominance and resistance as multifaceted and dialogical call for a similarly dialogical methodology, as reflected in Saukko's concept of contingent resistances. Compared to much of the past resistance research, contingent resistances sets forth an expanded vision of dialogicality in research design and in the interpretation of actor's meanings. Our purpose is to illustrate three implications of this methodology: (i) polyvocality—a comparison of perspectives of two groups of actors; (ii) consideration of the full range of meanings relevant to the action with particular attention to reactions from the local context; and (iii) interpretations of resistance that are firmly grounded in narrators' meanings. The analysis is based on interviews with parents and their young adolescent daughters about their decision to attend a new all‐girl college‐preparatory public school located in southwestern USA. Expanding on past studies of girls' school choice, we show how parents and daughters create different meanings of this decision, largely based on interactions with their peers. Although both parents and daughters emphasized academic opportunity as their main reason for the school choice, daughters, unlike parents, were confronted with violating peer femininity/heteronormativity norms. Thus, the decision required resistance on the part of daughters in a way that it did not for parents. We view contingent resistances as a useful methodological framework in a range of areas where questions of resistance are at stake. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Getting one's thoughts straight: A dialogical analysis of women's accounts of poorly controlled type 2 diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disorder characterised by chronically elevated blood glucose and a high risk of cardiovascular and other complications. Self-management is central to diabetes care and includes taking regular exercise, low-fat/sugar diet and blood glucose monitoring. However, little is understood about how people with diabetes make sense of self-management. Our aim, therefore, is to explore the process of ‘getting one's thoughts straight’ in relation to illness self-management for women with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes. Eight women were recruited from two hospitals in the North of England. Each was interviewed using a biographic-narrative method. Narratives were analysed using a dialogical approach. We use Bakhtin's concepts of voice, official and unofficial truth, and internally persuasive discourse to explore how participants considered, struggled with, and, sometimes, acted upon self-management. We demonstrate how the truth by which participants lived shifted as they encountered new perspectives and experiences. The accounts revealed tension between official, authoritative voices, typically concerned with optimal illness control and unofficial voices that speak at a lived, embodied level. In conclusion, we suggest moving beyond the notion of self-management towards a conceptualisation of life with chronic illness that includes personal goals, values and embodied experience in context.     

How Can We Understand and Describe “Non-Narrative” Narratives? A Qualitative Study of Workers with Recurring Sick Leave

This study explored methodologies enabling us to hear the “non-narrative” voices of participants in narrative research. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven Japanese workers with recurring sick leave, and the data were analyzed using thematic analysis (TA) and dialogical narrative analysis (DNA). In narrators' apparently chaotic and fragmented statements, TA identified three divided self-images that remained disconnected: image of present self with a sense of setbacks, image of past self, and image of ideal self. As the last two self-images ceaselessly negate the first, these workers had lost a sense of autonomy and self-confidence. On the other hand, DNA described their desperate endeavors to organize their sick leave experiences by appealing to the typology of the illness narrative; however, this effort remained a failure. Through two qualitative analyses that suspended the premise that each narrative enables the narrator's construction of self, we were able to understand the real status of participants who could not narrate their experiences. The ethical obligation of researchers to respect the “unfinalizability” of narrative and remain open to continuous dialogue is discussed.     

Alliance rupture and repair processes in borderline personality disorder: A case study using dialogical sequence analysis

Objective: This study examined alliance rupture and repair processes in borderline personality disorder (BPD) and how the content of sessions interacts with the quality of the alliance.

Design: A mixed methods single case study design was employed incorporating quantitative and qualitative measures of process and outcome.

Methods: This case study examined a 22-year-old female with BPD who received 16 sessions of Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Measures of alliance, symptoms and global functioning were taken across multiple time-points. Selected sessions were analysed using dialogical sequence analysis (DSA), a theory-driven method of psychotherapy research that analyses utterances according to their author, addressee and referential object.

Results: Quantitative data indicated symptom reduction without functional improvement. DSA demonstrated that the first exchanges in therapy were reflective of key relational themes. The case suggests that, rather than simply negotiating tasks and goals, repairing ruptures involves systematically linking the manifest topic to the client’s core problems.

Conclusions: This case study points to the mediating role that the content of sessions has on alliance quality. Results underline the importance of the therapist stance, the need for a shared formulation to make sense of relational processes and the use of responsively timed interventions to decrease desperation and improve self-reflection.     

Ambivalence under scrutiny: Returning to the future

Abstract

This Special Issue on the study of ambivalent processes in psychology integrates issues from contemporary evolutionary, cognitive, and cultural psychology with new directions of formal models that are available in qualitative mathematics. Tribute is paid to the pioneer of the study of ambivalence—Else Frenkel-Brunswik. Her work antedates most of our contemporary efforts in this field. Becoming free from the limits of its obsession with numbers in lieu of “measurement”, psychology at our time faces the challenge of investigation of dynamic psychological complexity. Contemporary mathematics—which is qualitative in its nature—provides new opportunities for psychology. New mathematical models—based on topology (Morse functions) and from intuitionistic formal logic (theory of locales)—are shown to provide promising new directions for future research on ambivalence. The emphasis on mathematical tools as enablement devices for psychological theorizing leads psychology to the need to create new kinds of generalized understanding of complex psychological processes.     

Talking about talking: Interpersonal process recall as an intersubjective approach to research

Research methods are often marked by inequalities between researcher and researched, maintained through dominant discourses that structure expectations of research. This study considers how therapeutic skills such as reflexivity can help to develop alternative discourses, raise awareness and challenge inequalities in research. An approach to the qualitative analysis of research interviews using interpersonal process recall (IPR) is outlined. By focusing attention on the dialogue and enabling researcher and research participant to review and explore their interaction reflexively, IPR offers an opportunity to understand interviews as intersubjective events. It thus facilitates the collaborative identification of processes and narratives as key moments for further analysis and increases awareness of the potential blurring of genres between therapeutic and research conversations. The contribution of IPR to an intersubjective lens and greater equality in research interviewing is discussed. Potential implications for both research and therapy practices are suggested.     

Innovative moments and poor outcome in narrative therapy

Aims: To analyse a poor outcome case of narrative therapy with a woman victim of intimate violence. Method: The Innovative Moments Coding System: version 1 was applied to all sessions to track the innovative moments (i‐moments) in the therapeutic process. I–moments are the narrative details that occur in psychotherapeutic conversations that are outside the influence of the problematic narrative. This research aims to describe the processes involved in the stability of meanings in psychotherapy through a dialogical approach to meaning making. Findings: Contrarily to what usually occurs in good outcome cases, re‐conceptualization i‐moments are absent. Moreover, two specific types of i‐moments emerged with higher duration: reflection and protest. Qualitative analysis showed that the potential meanings of these i‐moments were surpassed by a return to the problematic narrative. Conclusion: The therapeutic stability seems to be maintained by a systematic return to the problematic narrative after the emergence of novelties. This process was referred from a dialogical perspective as a mutual in‐feeding of voices, one that emerges in the i‐moment and another one that supports the problematic narrative, which is maintained by an oscillation between these two types of voices during therapy.     

Therapeutic moments are the key: foster children give clues to their past experience of infant trauma and neglect

Foster parents often despair over the lack of information about the past experience of the children in their care, particularly with children who have experienced infant trauma and neglect. In the context of family therapy these unknowns pose both a challenge and an opportunity. The author proposes that foster children gives clues to their past experiences in therapeutic moments, which the therapist may recognize as a result of her own inner conversation. In conjunction with a sound theoretical knowledge of infant trauma and neglect, these moments have the capacity to open a dialogue in the relationships between therapist, child and foster family. This dialogical process offers an opportunity for the child's past experience of infant trauma and neglect to be expressed in silence, and the foster parent's present experience to be heard in stillness, opening for them a way to go on beyond the family therapy sessions.