Vital Researcher Conversations: Pivoting Past Impasses in Qualitative Research

Abstract

In this article, we address the vital, yet largely ignored role conversations among researchers play in furthering qualitative research projects. We identify conversations as vital when they foster creativity and afford the researchers an opportunity for clearer focus. Through a close examination of four distinctly different qualitative research experiences, we show how these conversations open and deepen reflective relationships among the researchers and with the phenomenon being studied, both of which lead to a reformulation of the research process. Finally, we suggest that these kinds of conversations emerge out of relational contexts that honor personal meaning, care, openness, and even vulnerability among researchers.

Keywords

dialogue qualitative research conversation phenomenology method creativity

Spoken as opposed to written speech is the great discovery, the great rediscovery, of the life of dialogue. The genuine spoken word is spoken in the context of relationship, of mutuality, and it takes its very meaning from the fact that it is said by one person and heard by another who relates to it from an entirely different ground.

—Buber in Friedman (1991, pp. 125-126).

Few would dispute the critical role conversations with colleagues play in our research and scholarly lifeworlds. Be they scheduled or spontaneous, these conversations often stand at the center of the academic experience. And yet, researcher-to-researcher dialogue is at best peripheral in scholarly literature. In this article, we tell the story of how our researcher conversations moved from being a background aspect of a dialogal project—exploring an entirely different topic—to becoming the object of our collective attention, ultimately producing a new set of discussions about the role of conversation in furthering the research process.

We start by setting the stage: exploring how researcher conversation has and has not been taken up by the human sciences. We then tell our own story of how we came together as a group through developing an appreciation of the conversations we were having about “very unfortunate events” (the topic of a multiuniversity research project in which our Seattle University group was initially involved). This is followed by a presentation and examination of four vignettes from prior collaborative research experiences. In each, conversation played an important role in pivoting the project out of impasse and into deeper relationship and understanding.

Setting the Stage

The peripheral status of conversation in the research process can be traced back to the European enlightenment, and the evolving preference for observation over interpretation, and measurement over illustration (Mahoney, 2004; Richards, 2010). As the scientific method developed and coalesced, what you did as a natural philosopher/scientist/scholar became more important than what you talked about while doing it. However, over the course of the 20th century, some academic disciplines became wary of the absolute status of the scientific method as the way of knowing (Richards, 2010).

Out of this wariness emerged a number of philosophical and methodological movements (e.g., phenomenology, poststructuralism, postmodernism) reasserting the inevitability of a hermeneutic world in which knowledge is not just discovered but also developed, not just identified but also interpreted. These developments produced a growing interest in the activities of researchers involved in the research process. Yet, throughout the 20th century, attention to researcher-related dialogue remained minimal. In psychology, the peripheral status of researcher conversation held true for both quantitative and qualitative perspectives, but to different degrees and in different ways.

In quantitative approaches, researcher conversation exists as a taken-for-granted, ongoing activity, but—as with other subjective, interpretive elements—it plays little role in the formal accounting of any particular study. For example, Method section will not outline researcher conversation’s role in how the study is conducted and Discussion section will be silent on how researcher conversation affected a study’s observed outcomes. The longstanding nature of this silence is underscored by Bakan’s (1967) now 50-year-old observation that:

what we ordinarily call methodology needs to be expanded to include the culture and psychology of psychologists. By allowing this to happen we can both avoid becoming hollow men [and women] and relate more meaningfully to the culture at large. (p. 49)

Bakan’s (1967) advice is marginally followed by those taking a qualitative approach to psychological questions. On the positive side, the 20th-century emergence of relational psychoanalysis, Gadamerian hermeneutics, and social constructionism gave theoretical and practical heft to the notion that psychological “truths” (and the processes that beget them) are interpretive, relational, and structurally dynamic. Notably, Gendlin’s (2009) experiential phenomenology emphasizes how dialogue can bring forward fresh language about a phenomenon under study as well as new ways to understand it. Similar developments in anthropology and sociology shifted those disciplines away from researcher-as-distant-observer, to a more participatory approach in which researchers move between immersing and extracting themselves in the experiences they are studying (e.g., Tedlock, 1991; Vidich & Lyman, 1994).

Together these and other developments did restructure the research process as well as the attitudes of those attending to the qualitative elements of human experience. Indeed, by the 1980s, these psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists were paying increasing attention to the role of dialogue. And out of this developed new methodologies such as interpretive phenomenological analysis (e.g., Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009), conversation analysis (e.g., Drew, 2003), heuristic inquiry (Moustakas, 1990), and course, narrative psychology (e.g., Riessman, 2008). It is regrettable that across these diverse methodologies, the conversations of interest were almost exclusively those occurring between researchers and their participants. As Corley, Masterson, and Schinoff (2016) have pointed out, “connections made within research teams (i.e., between co-authors) remain largely unexplored” (p. 331).

Exceptions do exist, especially in the context of teamwork among qualitative researchers (e.g., Barry, Britten, Barber, Bradley, & Stevenson, 1999), and research supervision Grant (2010). Barry et al. (1999), on the basis of a review of the literature and their own work as a group of qualitative researchers, argue that reflexivity employed as a group activity has significant benefits. Most notably, they believe that it can be shown to bring about improvements “in terms of process, project quality, and team output” (Barry et al., 1999, p. 42). Grant’s (2010) fascinating qualitative study examines the process of supervision of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences. She found that even though the relationship between faculty and student was hierarchical, the supervision dialogue does give rise, from time to time, to improvisation that is creative and moves the thesis project forward in unexpected and gratifying ways.

More frequently, the focus on dialogue between research participants and researchers, is found in a number of studies. For example, Moss and Barnes (2008) explore the collaborative dynamics of a project using transcript data taken from members of a mindfulness group. Within the context of educational research, Clark et al. (1996) conceptualize “collaboration as dialogue” (p. 193) using the “Reader’s Theater script” technique (p. 194). The authors identify dialogue as the defining feature of collaboration, and provide examples of the challenges faced by those who would present dialogal work using the more monologic formats of traditional academic scholarship.

While each of these research groups is clearly interested in the collaborative process, the conversations that form the subject of analysis still favor those occurring among study participants (e.g., Moss & Barnes, 2008) or between researchers and their subjects who may also be identified as coresearchers (e.g., Clark et al., 1996). In the context of educational research, however, a more extensive exploration of researcher conversation is provided by Sweetland, Huber, and Whelan (2004). Both the origin and structure of their article is inspired by conversation, with the authors paying significant attention to the nature of dialogue.

There is one more notable exception. While studying forgiveness in 1984-1985, Steen Halling, Jan Rowe, and four psychology graduate students found themselves struggling with how to approach their topic (Rowe et al., 1989). Inspired by dialogal thinkers including Buber (1958, 1965), Gadamer (1975), and Strasser (1969) and methodologically influenced by phenomenological psychologists including Giorgi (1970), the group did not start the project intending to “invent” a specific methodology (Halling, 2008, p. 165). Yet this is what happened and the dialogal method was born, an approach that attends to “two simultaneous levels of dialogue: among researchers and between the researchers and the phenomenon being studied” (Halling, 2008, p. 165). Since that time, Halling, Rowe, and their colleagues and students at Seattle University have used the dialogal approach to study other topics including despair (Beck et al., 2003, 2005), being a couple (Sayre, Lambo, & Navarre, 2006), deep connection with another (Guts, Halling, Pierce, Romatz, & Schulz, 2016), and the meaning of money in everyday life (Chan-Brown, Douglass, Halling, Keller, & McNabb, 2016).

Getting There . . . Together

The impetus for the current article came in 2009, when Fred Wertz of Fordham University’s Psychology Department wrote one of the authors, Steen Halling, to find out if he and his colleagues would be interested in participating in a project in which different qualitative approaches were used to analyze two written descriptions and follow-up interviews about a “very unfortunate event” (Wertz et al., 2011). The four of us met to consider working together to bring a dialogal perspective to the data. As we realized that our shared interest in the project was strong, we proceeded with our preliminary analysis. As we engaged with the Wertz data, however, we found ourselves unexpectedly pursuing a different topic: the critical role of researcher conversations in the research process. What follows is an account of how we got to this new area of inquiry, and what we discovered through being there and calling forth significant conversations arising from other research endeavors.

Our initial conversations focused on how our contribution to this project seemed to differ from previous dialogal efforts and whether these differences were detrimental to the dialogal approach’s effectiveness. One area of divergence concerned the timing of question formulation. The dialogal approach (Halling, Leifer, & Rowe, 2006) requires researchers to first write their own descriptions about the phenomenon at hand, and then formulate research and interview questions out of the group’s reflection on these accounts. These principles presented a challenge to be addressed because in the Wertz project the question and data were developed and collected by someone outside the dialogal group, using a different methodology and with different intentions.

To what extent was this issue going to be problematic? Were we “pushing the envelope” in a productive manner or creating a new approach while acting otherwise? These conversations led us to revisit the basic tenets and relevance of the dialogal method. Interestingly, both the difficulties and our efforts to resolve them resulted in a shared sense of what we were and were not seeking to understand. First, we realized that we were not going to resolve the dilemma by merely having a speculative conversation about it but that we needed to ground ourselves in the phenomenon at the center of the project. That is, in keeping with the tenets of the dialogal method, we needed to reflect on and write our own experiences of having lived through a “very unfortunate event.”

Accordingly, we wrote our own descriptions of a very unfortunate event. This was followed by several meetings during which each of us read our descriptions to the group, followed by lengthy discussions. All conversations were tape-recorded and transcribed, allowing us to revisit them in subsequent meetings.

The content of our individual descriptions varied. For example, one of us described witnessing a friend’s deteriorating mental health, and the sense of dislocation and guilt that occurred subsequent to moving out of the area in the midst of this crisis. Another described having an apparent second heart attack. Confusion over symptoms led him to the emergency room. He was finally released after no evidence of a heart attack was found, but continued to live with the feeling of being at the mercy of his body for some time further. One of us wrote about a minor traffic accident that left all parties physically uninjured, but produced in the writer a more lasting “odd relation” to those around him. Finally, one of us described a series of home invasions that devolved into a brief hostage situation with safe resolution. Having shared these descriptions, we developed a new level of trust and closeness as we considered the depth of these stories. In other words, through this process of immersion and discussion, our connection to the subject matter and each other deepened, and four individuals gradually became a group that had the phenomenon as a focal presence.

Our discussion of these events also changed over time. At first, we focused on trying to understand the individual events contextually. But as we listened to each other’s descriptions, we saw the patterns that connected them. Identifying these involved tentative, searching dialogue. Each of us was simultaneously wary of making premature conclusions and letting something in the description go unnoticed. After several weeks of this kind of conversation, we settled on broad points of connection; the patterns within and between our descriptions became clearer. Our desire to learn more details about each other’s stories started to coincide with attempts to connect them with our own, similar lived experiences while also pivoting into a more open perspective on the phenomenon.

For instance, after sharing the experience of having a truck fail to stop on a wet downhill grade and hitting another car, the slow motion inevitability of the situation became tangible as we remembered watching the horrific images of planes crashing into the World Trade Center over and over again on TV. As we moved from more concrete, situational questions to relating the events back to our own lives, we slowly settled into a deeper, felt understanding. The process of getting clearer about the experience itself, followed by grappling with its complexity and situatedness in our own lives, produced in us a clearer understanding of the phenomenon of “very unfortunate events” we lacked at the beginning of this project. It also produced an awareness and appreciation of the fundamental importance of conversation in the research process. We had come together through what we were doing together. And what we were doing together was talking, listening, and being with each other; initially from without, but eventually, from within.

This experience pivoted the phenomenon of researcher conversation to the foreground, a shift that proved to be experience-near and intriguing. And it led to many questions. What constitutes an important, vital researcher conversation? What role might such conversation play in the overall research process? Keeping with the basic tenets of the dialogal method, we began a new phase of this now new project by individually reflecting on our own experiences of vital conversation. What follows are the results of these reflections: four vignettes about very different research experiences in which vital conversations occur, deepening relationships, and pivoting participants past impasse.

Being There . . . Together and Separately

We start with an account of conflict and resolution about a controversial topic between two researchers new to working together. When Sayre is hired as a qualitative research consultant, one of the other researchers is concerned his analysis of data does not sufficiently counter the notion that victims are partly responsible for domestic abuse. This story is distinctive in that e-mail is the primary mode of communication thorough which the dispute occurs and is resolved. It also demonstrates how vigorous discussion of disparate views results in a more compelling and balanced interpretative stance.

Next is a story of two researchers developing a presentation on the topic of empathy. Their initial project conversations are fruitful and enjoyable, but also meandering and needing structure and focus. The solution comes in the form of a whiteboard: its physical possibilities and limitations required Lilleleht and her colleague to listen very carefully to each other, and allows them to express their ideas boldly and succinctly. A change in structure allowed for a breakthrough.

Krycka’s story centers on a research group studying clients’ experience of body awareness in body focused treatment. The group is struggling with the question of how best to bring together a more traditional way of assessing treatment outcome with one that is more experiential. A shift occurs when a group member realizes that the struggle is not a problem but an essential part of the collaborative process. This discovery, achieved through conversation, moves the previously stalled process forward.

The last story is told from the perspective of a graduate student group studying the experience of personal discovery. Through a class exercise led by Halling, these students realize the importance of remaining connected with their own experience of discovery as they converse about this phenomenon. From this place of deeper connection, they were better able to help their research participants reconnect with the events they were describing such that their stories become richer and more detailed.

From E-Mail Tension to Conversational Confluence: The Value of Addressing Conflict

In our first example, Sayre reflects on conversations that were part of an ongoing grounded theory research project. Interestingly, some of the conversation took place over e-mail, a medium that lacks the range of expression of the face-to-face encounter.

Since 2005, researchers at the Puget Sound Veteran’s Administration Health Services have conducted a large scale research study examining veteran posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), intimate partner violence, and veteran’s spousal relationships. The original project was a quantitative study involving more than 400 couples, with a data set of interviews with both partners. The primary investigator was April Gerlock, a doctoral-level nurse practitioner/clinician with extensive experience with this population. The project coordinator/coinvestigator was Jackie Grimesey, a psychologist with experience in qualitative research, the veteran population, and PTSD. As the data collection neared completion, Sayre—a family psychologist and therapist experienced in qualitative research with couples, but with little experience working with veterans—was invited to be a project consultant. His work would involve doing a qualitative data analysis of a small, purposefully sampled, selection of couples’ interviews.

In planning the qualitative analysis, the three researchers had several conversations about the overall project and the methodological approach. Previous research showed that veterans who suffer from PTSD had significantly higher rates of interpersonal violence than both the general public and other veterans (Bell & Orcutt, 2009; Marshalla, Panuzioa, & Tafta, 2005). Gerlock and Grimesey were interested in developing a better understanding of dynamics at play in these relationships.

To ensure openness open to the data, Sayre did not review Gerlock and Grimesey’s previously published material or the preliminary quantitative findings. Thus, the first conversation they had regarding the dynamics of these couples followed Sayre’s presentation of the qualitative findings to the larger research group. He was acutely aware of his position as a consultant, working with someone else’s data. During the discussion, there were many clarifying questions, and a great deal of feedback regarding how the analysis resonated with both the quantitative data and Gerlock’s and Grimesey’s clinical experience. By the end of the meeting, Sayre’s anxiety had subsided.

Subsequently, the researchers turned their attention to writing presentations, facing a submission deadline for a family therapy conference. It was decided that Sayre would generate this rough draft and distribute it by e-mail. The draft he wrote and sent to his colleagues closely reflected the findings he presented in the previous meeting. By e-mail, Grimesey replied that it looked great. In contrast, Gerlock’s e-mail included a long list of concerns regarding how the material might be understood and misunderstood. She was particularly concerned about the role of perpetrator responsibility for violence and the related issue that couples therapy is contraindicated in cases of domestic violence because it was found to escalate abuse. She described her understanding of these issues and asked if Sayre might have missed those factors. After reading this e-mail, Sayre felt surprised and conflicted: As the consultant, he was concerned because the client seemed less than happy; as researcher, he was wary because it seemed as if Gerlock wanted the research results to fit a predetermined expectation.

After some deliberation, Sayre sent an e-mail response to Grimesey and Gerlock, summarizing the latter’s points. He acknowledged her clinical experience, and said that she was raising important issues. Although Sayre understood the importance of the issues raised, at the time this e-mail felt to him more like a placating response than an opening for conversation. Later, Sayre sent Gerlock another e-mail, acknowledging her concern and asking for elaboration. In her reply, she made reference to problematic family therapy literature that clearly blamed the victim. Sayre suggested that they needed to find a way to address these issues. He rewrote the presentation addressing both the complex relational dynamics and expressing a strong stance regarding the issue of perpetrator responsibility and sent it back to his coresearchers. Gerlock responded to this new draft with enthusiasm.

One month later when the three researchers met in person, they discussed the issues that had come up “electronically” in a relaxed way. Their previous e-mail conversations, unfolding as they had at a distance, had provided each participant with time and space to weigh and create responses. During the in-person meeting, Sayre was mindful of how important this project was to both women. As Gerlock shared her worries, her deep and genuine concern for both the veterans and their partners came through. In the end, electronically and in person, Gerlock, Grimesey, and Sayre were able to identify the project’s central challenge: to remain faithful to the stories, describing the lived experience of PTSD and interpersonal violence as a complex relationship phenomenon that also involved individual responsibility. This nuanced and realistic perspective had evolved through dialogue sustained in the face of initial disagreements.

Whiteboard as Therapist: How Changing Structure Enables Progress

Another example of vital conversation comes from the group member least experienced with collaborative research. Indeed, for Lilleleht part of the draw of our project was the opportunity to be engaged in a shared versus individual scholarly experience. This desire was also at the base of another collaborative project from which the following example is drawn. It serves as an illustration of how a conversational process can be fostered and continued by the presence of an inanimate object: the ubiquitous whiteboard. More broadly, it shows how a “third party” can move dialogue forward.

In the fall of 2010, Lilleleht began a collaboration with Jennifer Schulz of Seattle University’s English Department. They had discovered a topic that fit both of their interests: empathy. In particular, Lilleleht and Schulz shared similar concerns regarding the nature of psychotherapeutic discourse on empathy, and the degree to which current ways of thinking and writing about empathy might be taking clinicians and others away from the essence of the phenomenon. Schulz had just discovered the work of Edith Stein (1891-1942), an early 20th-century Jewish and German phenomenologist. A student of Husserl, Stein (1964) wrote her doctoral dissertation, “On the Problem of Empathy,” in the late teens (1917/1964). As the two women learned more about Stein, it became clear that her study of empathy could be the perfect figure for dislocating what had become a simultaneously empty cultural and entrenched professional concept.

Lilleleht and Schulz began meeting weekly: reading, talking, allowing themselves to be pulled in any number of directions and waiting to see which (if any) had staying power. As ideas solidified, during one meeting, they experienced the almost simultaneous need to concretize the conversation as they were having it. Lilleleht found a movable whiteboard and brought it into her office. Over the course of the next half hour, Lilleleht and Schulz took turns at the board, listening to each other and using multicolored markers to give physical shape to new, tentative questions, and the even more tentative structures through which these questions might be explored.

Over subsequent meetings, the board became a kind of third person in the room. Bearing witness, representing ideas in a bold, unapologetic way, inviting underlining or erasure, this inanimate object became the facilitator of a dynamic conversation. It was a small board, and this meant that Lilleleht and Schulz had to listen carefully to each other in order to identify and express essential meanings in well chosen, economical language. Over the course of several weeks, the whiteboard became a medium through which conversation could be accelerated. For example, at critical points, the whiteboard’s presence and current written content prompted Lilleleht and Schulz to move ideas out of the rambling language of speculation and into the more defining structure of a formal project. At other times, the whiteboard’s inherent limitations (e.g., space, the delay between speaking a thought and writing it down) led the two collaborators to slow down; to listen, ask, and listen again, until the writer could articulate the speaker’s intent directly, as opposed to writing around it.

Eventually, every meeting began with pulling out the board. Using the board, Lilleleht and Schulz wrote a conference abstract out of what remained. By March 2011, they found themselves needing to move on, to erase the board, and start the next phase of the project. Interestingly, both were reluctant to do so. Although the time had come, it proved surprisingly difficult to say good-bye to the “therapist.”

Conflict Is Not a Problem: Moving Ahead by Embracing Struggle

In 2008, Krycka approached Cynthia Price, a researcher at the University of Washington, with the proposition to study the body therapy approach recently developed by Price and a fellow practitioner (Blackburn & Price, 2007). Mindful Body Awareness is a form of massage therapy that is an adjunct to traditional medical care and distinct from existing forms of therapeutic massage. Specifically, this therapy helps patients find and then articulate their bodily felt awareness during treatment (Price, 2005, 2006; Price & Thompson, 2007). After several meetings, Krycka and Price decided it would be best for the project to have more voices involved to help think through issues arising when studying such a treatment process and that involving less experienced researchers who were also unfamiliar with the massage protocol would add a fresh perspective.

A dialogal research team was then assembled that included Price (nursing research faculty), Krycka (psychology faculty), and Breitenbucher and Brown (psychotherapists new to research). The research study has since been completed and published (Price, Krycka, Breitenbucher, & Brown, 2013).

Working through the layers of issues involved in creating a new way to understand the experience of body awareness in this treatment was neither easy nor smooth. After all, more traditional approaches focus on validating the new treatment through administering pretest and posttest treatment scales (e.g., Beck Depression Inventory, Hardiness Scale). But would these scales be able to capture what the team wanted: the lived, bodily experience of the treatment? Coming to a place where they could tentatively resolve some of these issues involved entering into sometimes confusing, sometimes spirited conversations about how to let the experience of the treatment speak for itself.

A particular moment illustrates the struggle with and resolution of some of these issues. As the group was refining its use of the dialogal method within a treatment outcomes study, it became clear that this project would extend the dialogal method’s reach into a more traditional research framework. The team adapted the dialogal method to make room for a “mixed model” approach that used a session feedback form called the HAT (Helpful Aspects of Therapy form; Elliott, Greenburg, & Lietaer, 2004).

The team spent several meetings struggling with how to use the HAT in the dialogal analysis. Team members were not equally experienced with the method, making some of the early conversations feel a bit like being on a roller coaster. Would the team ever find a way not to fall back into the more traditional mode of thinking about the study design, in particular the use of the HAT data?

At a certain point, the group realized it had reached an impasse. One person acknowledged this out loud. Another made a general reflection about how struggle was part of the dialogal method itself. Everyone then realized they had been viewing the dialogal research process as if they were outside of it, and failing to see they were already far along in the process. This cleared the air as the group members realized that they had just gotten to a place thought previously unreachable. In this case, the conversation was the dialogal process with which they felt they had lost touch. They recognized that the difficulties they were having were not indications that they had lost their way but were part of the movement forward.

From Talking About to Evoking Together: Aligning Researchers With the Phenomenon

Our final example comes from a graduate student paper written for a qualitative research course Halling taught at Duquesne University in 1987. The students worked in small groups, using the dialogal approach to research topics they themselves chose. The group in question focused on the phenomenon of a “personal moment of discovery.” In their paper, they described a transition that occurred in the class itself, one that provided an important lesson for their own particular way of working together (Piers, Robertson, Schrecengost, Strassburger, & Stern, 1987). The classroom conversations, they noted, had been disjointed, and discontinuous, without the in-depth and more personal level of conversation of phenomena that characterized the small group meetings. However, this changed during one particular class when the instructor suggested there be a period of quiet meditation on the descriptions each student had shared before the class entered into a discussion of them. This was followed by a period of silence, and a conversation that was qualitatively different from before:

For a time, we spoke not about discovery as people in a classroom would, but out of the discoveries that we re-lived in those moments. Later, our group described the mood in the classroom as “personal,” “intimate,” and “respectful.” The original sense of discovery for each student had been re-evoked and we could feel that sense in the room . . . the comments that followed the quiet, collective recollections remained focused on the specific topic and were clearly rooted in personal experience. We were struck by the “sameness,” the “tie” among members of that large group as we listened to each other. (Piers et al., 1987, p. 6)

This atmosphere was similar to that of their first small group meetings. Once the group members got to the point where they had written their own accounts of the experience of discovery, they read them to each other. They found that speaking from personal experience created a quality of intimacy and reverence in the room.

Subsequently, the researchers approached their participants from a stance of “dwelling with the phenomenon,” encouraging them to take a moment to reconnect with the situation they were going to describe before speaking about it. This stance allowed for a more intimate and focused conversation with their interviewees. They concluded that writing from a perspective of being experientially grounded in the phenomenon accounted for their bringing the project to a successful conclusion (Piers et al., 1987).

Discussion

Vital researcher conversations are not necessarily easy or smooth. They may be unplanned, occur in virtual spaces, or involve inanimate objects. In all their variety, the four vignettes and the larger story encompassing them illustrate how conversation can be a generative process. In particular, they illustrate two roles vital conversations played in our collective research experiences. First, these conversations opened and deepened reflective relationships with each other and the phenomena. Second, in doing so, they led to a pivoting forward of the research process.

Each vignette involved conversations through which the researchers developed more open relationships with each other. For Lilleleht and Schulz, the utilization of the whiteboard as a “kind of third person” provided them a new way of relating that allowed them to listen to each other carefully and express their ideas in a more “bold, unapologetic way” than they had up to that point. In other research projects, of course, the new way in which the researchers worked together might take a very different shape. Through vital conversation mediated partly by e-mail, Sayre came to both understand Gerlock’s point, and develop a clearer and more respectful understanding of his coinvestigator as an individual with “deep and genuine concern” for the all those for whom the research was seeking to speak. Most significantly, the resolution of conflict led to a more thoughtful analysis and presentation of data. In Krycka’s example, an impasse that could have derailed the whole project was bridged through reframing a supposed obstacle as an important stage in the process. Through conversation, the research team found its own distinct way through thorny issues and came to a deeper understanding of each other and the reflexivity of the dialogic method. Halling identified his students’ vital conversation as the moment they no longer spoke to each other “as people working on a research process in a classroom would” but in a manner that was “personal,” “intimate,” and “respectful;” they were vital to the generative process.

In each vignette, the relational shift to greater openness and mutual respect was also crucial to maintaining or creating closer connections to the phenomenon, to “working from the inside.” For example, in the context of exploring “very unfortunate events,” respectful and intentional conversations fostered engagement with experience rather than creating distance. And as Halling’s students vividly illustrate, vital conversations provided researchers with guidance, moving them to deeper levels with each other, their research participants, and the “moment of personal discovery.”

Conversations producing such relational deepening often led to an opening up and movement of the research process itself. Indeed, as we look back on the vignettes, we are pleasantly surprised by how often this occurred, and to what effect. For example, through one vital conversation Krycka and his fellow colleagues came to see how they had been approaching their research process from the outside, and were able to come to a place previously thought unreachable. This awareness brought the project’s central challenge to the fore, providing fresh ways to approach the data, and helping the researchers gain perspective on how diverse aspects of the project fit together as a whole.

Conclusion

Engaging in, reflecting on, and varying the conversation enables researchers to overcome conflict, gain new insights, and pivot out of personal preoccupations and methodological morasses. We think of such conversations as vital when they deepen relationships and move the research process forward. By vital, we also mean life giving, foundational, and imaginative. There are certainly parallels between these conversations and Grant’s (2010) notion of dialogue that gives rise to improvisation.

But even this is not enough. In each case, it were the stories, ideas, and/or data that engaged the researchers, motivating them (and us) to work through numerous impasses. There was something to get back to, be it “empathy” or “personal discovery,” not just something to put in perspective or set aside. As we indicated at the beginning of this article, our own working together was something of an experiment. We had not developed the interview question about “having a very unfortunate experience” or collected the original data. Undertaking the original project helped us realize that giving ongoing attention to the nature of our conversation, and making this part of our practice, fostered engagement with the phenomenon rather than creating a distance from it. We believe such engagement is critical for successful qualitative research.

Although researchers are endlessly engaged in conversation, certain types play a vital role in the research process. Such communication not only facilitates the inquiry process but can be an original source of discovery about the phenomenon under study. We would argue that the value of these conversations (for the researcher’s development, the collaborative process, and as a source of data) has received little attention in the literature and, we suspect, by researchers themselves. And while their serendipitous nature renders course and appearance unpredictable, we suggest vital conversations emerge out of relational contexts honoring personal meaning, care, openness, and even vulnerability. It follows then that fostering such relationships among ourselves as researchers, as well as studying further the phenomenon of vital conversation, hold great potential for enriching the research process and deepening our understanding of any phenomena we seek to explore.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Steen Halling is a professor emeritus psychology at Seattle University and the author of Intimacy, Transcendence, and Psychology. His research focus has been on qualitative research methods, the psychology of forgiveness and disillusionment, and understanding disturbed behavior from a phenomenological perspective.

Erica Lilleleht is an associate professor and former chair of the Seattle University, Psychology Department. Her areas of scholarship include the history of psychology, the problems inherent in psychiatric rehabilitation, and the nature of empathy.

Kevin C. Krycka is professor of psychology and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Seattle University. His teaching and research are grounded in phenomenological psychology and the philosophy of Eugene Gendlin.

George Sayre is a health services researcher and the qualitative research coordinator at the VA Puget Sound Healthcare System HSR&D and a clinical assistant professor at the University of Washington, School of Public Health, Department of Health Services. He holds a doctorate of psychology in clinical family psychology.

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