What is qualitative psychological research?

Critical thinking
Article: Coyle, A (2015)
Introduction to qualitative psychological research

Introduction

This chapter examines the development of psychological interest in qualitative methods in historical context and point to the benefits that psychology gains from qualitative research.
It also looks at some important issues and developments in qualitative psychology.

Epistemology and the ‘scientific method’

At its most basic, qualitative psychological research may be regarded as involving the collection and analysis of non-numerical data through a psychological lens in order to provide rich descriptions and possibly explanations of peoples meaning-making, how they make sense of the world and how they experience particular events.

Qualitative research is bound up with particular sets of assumptions about the bases or possibilities of knowledge.
Epistemology: particular sets of assumptions about the bases or possibilities of knowledge.
Epistemology refers to a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the theory of knowledge and that tries to answer questions about how we can know what we know.
Ontology: the assumptions we make about the nature of being, existence or reality.

Different research approaches and methods are associated with different epistemologies.
The term ‘qualitative research’ covers a variety of methods with a range of epistemologies, resulting in a domain that is characterized by difference and tension.

The epistemology adopted by a particular study can be determined by a number of factors.

• A researcher may have a favoured epistemological outlook or position and may locate their research within this, choosing methods that accord to with that position.
• Alternatively, the researcher may be keen to use a particular qualitative method in their research and so they frame their study according to the epistemology that is usually associated with that method.

Whatever epistemological position is adopted in a study, it is usually desirable to ensure that you maintain this position consistently throughout the wire-up to help produce a coherent research report.

Positivism: holds that the relationship between the world and our sense perception of the world is straightforward. There is a direct correspondence between things in the world and our perception of them provided that our perception is not skewed by factors that might damage that correspondence.
So, it is possible to obtain accurate knowledge of things in the world, provided we can adopt an impartial, unbiased, objective viewpoint.

Empiricism: holds that our knowledge of the world must arise from the collection and categorization of our sense perceptions/observations of the world.
This categorization allows us to develop more complex knowledge of the world and to develop theories to explain the world.