Introduction to the Special Issue

Complexity

As qualitative psychologists, we share an appreciation for complex knowledge. It is not that we enjoy making things complicated or difficult for the sake of simply doing it, but we recognize that knowledge, constructions, and representations of human experiences are multifaceted, uniquely situated, and seldom (if ever) understandable through major theoretical frames of interpretation that operate across the board. Following the call of feminist researchers (Harding, 1987) to embrace epistemological complexity as a way to respect the multitude of perspectives and power relations that make up knowledge and inform realities, we are committed to forms of knowledge that avoid unnecessary reductions and that celebrate the complexities of experience.

We address and deal with concerns and issues that, by their very natures and effects, cannot be read unequivocally. Let’s think, for instance, about the importance of interpreting psychopathology from a variety of angles, all of which inform our understandings of and approaches to it. Personal suffering; medical and therapeutic models; psychological frameworks; historical, political, and economic contributions to the “existence” of pathologies; social constructions of illness and health; the role of ideologies and lobbies in health policies; geographical locations; and gender, racial, and cultural differences are all involved in the experience of living or being diagnosed with a psychiatric condition.

Qualitative inquiries often result in complex and nuanced accounts of realities and experiences that, differently from dominant or hegemonic discourses or statistical significance, acknowledge both the center and the margins. For example, in this special issue, Lene Tanggaard invites us to adopt ethnographic methods to explore psychological phenomena in everyday social practices, Brinkmann’s original account of a friend’s living at the outskirts of society as inspiration to think critically about the limits of knowing and understanding, Gemignani’s reflections on the untold and the forgotten as sites of knowledge, or Lavie-Ajayi’s and Lippke and Tanggaard’s interpretations of uncertainty in research.

Parallel to the above contributions is Mark Freeman’s article on the self-realization of psychological science, which shows how qualitative approaches in psychology often display a much greater fidelity to the phenomena than its quantitative cousins (see also Becker, 1996). It is this ironical that the charge of being unscientific is usually directed at the qualitative psychologists. Through a reading of Heidegger, Freeman presents 10 responses to critics of qualitative psychology showing that, ultimately, the self-realization of psychology as a science goes through qualitative inquiry.

Talking From the Margins

In many corners of the globe, the notion of qualitative psychology is still perceived as a contradiction in terms or, at best, as a smaller child of supposedly more respectable and scientific (i.e., quantitative and experimental) approaches in psychology. Numerous psychology departments around the world teach psychology as a uniquely quantitative discipline. Introductory textbook to the field rarely mention qualitative methodologies. Strangely, people who are responsible for the curricula in departments of psychology often forget that the discipline was in many ways founded on qualitative studies of human lives and experiences. And how, we might ask, could it be otherwise, given the characteristics of the subject matter studied by psychologists as and about living, acting, feeling human beings?

When quantitative researchers acknowledge the existence of qualitative research, they often object to its subjectivity, lack of systematicity, and little concern for issues of validity, reliability, and generalizability. Instead of seeing these concepts as universal indicators of research quality, qualitative researchers underscore that they are social and relational products. As for any criteria of judgment, they result from localized dialogues, agreements, joined processes, and mutual learnings among and often within (e.g., the same participant may give multiple interpretations of an event) the involved parties. Instead of reproducing and imposing specific views of knowledge, we agree with Altheide and Johnson (2011), who write,

A proper set of standards or criteria for assessing validity entails considering the place of evidence in an interaction process between the researcher, the subject matter (phenomenon to be investigated), the intended effect or utility, and the audience for which the project will be evaluated and assessed. (p. 593)

Instead of adhering to the directions of a cookbook, quality in qualitative inquiry is found in relational and context-based dialogues and voices, which inevitably result from and inform power relations. Qualitative researchers tend to be aware of the power-based and political dimensions of knowledge and science. Such awareness is a tool in their hands to question scientific and cultural hegemonies, think creatively, and act in socially responsible ways, like in Participatory Action Research, Critical Social Psychology, Narrative Theory, Discursive Positioning Theory, or Critical Discourse Analysis.

Although discourses about science (including those that are presented in this article) dictate canons or standards of quality for research, as qualitative researchers who find inspiration in constructivist and constructionist epistemologies, we are wary of power games and taken for granted truths or assumptions. For instance, in their contribution to this special issue, Kenneth and Mary Gergen propose that artistic sensitivities and forms of expression warrant a central place in psychological science. They challenge the science/art binary and explore the potentials of what they call a performative orientation to inquiry. Performative for them means that we, as researchers, write for an audience; that we, as human being, do things with words; that we, as social researchers, have to call attention to the significance of aesthetic skills in observing and reporting.

In the first and therefore groundbreaking APA publication on qualitative research in psychology, Marecek (2003) highlights the following characteristics of what she calls a qualitative stance in psychology: (a) Qualitative inquiry embeds the study of psychology in rich contexts of history, society, and culture. (b) It resituates the people whom we study in their life worlds, paying special attention to the social locations they occupy. (c) It regards those whom we study as reflexive, meaning-making, and intentional actors. The keywords here are context (unlike much experimental psychology, qualitative psychologists insist on studying human lives in the settings in which they unfold and not just in laboratories), life worlds (although this term originates in phenomenology, it signals a broader interest in human life as experienced from the insider or first-person perspectives), and meaning-making (human beings are approached not as passive victims of their circumstances that react according to alleged causal laws, but as capable of acting in situations to construct meaning and significance to actions and events).

The view of scientific knowledge that Marecek provides is in sharp contrast to the education that graduate and undergraduate students of psychology receive today in often uniquely quantitative departments. Outside academia, these graduates will meet a psychological reality of acting and suffering persons, real-life experiences, individuals in collectives, and groups in society. They will not encounter statistical averages or artificial experimental situations. Similarly, the distinction between basic and applied research does not hold in our field, as people (and cognitions, feelings, and behaviors) do not simply happen in vacuums. There is in general an enormous decoupling of psychology as a science from the practical, qualitative world in which psychologists work. For that reason, practitioners often point out that the knowledge produced by so-called mainstream psychology is too rarely useful.

In light of an appreciation for ecological and pragmatic approaches to inquiry, qualitative psychology builds conceptual and material bridges to connect the complex human world to the knowledge produced by psychology. Often, the knowledge produced through qualitative epistemologies can be used by people in their daily lives. To an extent, this counters for instance the paradox of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, which for decades was lectured in the Universities, but not in the streets or factories, for example, even though the author wrote it with the intention of influencing the man on the street. Having a psychology that is socially useful means to claim that qualitative psychologists embrace the need to transform social practices.

Language and Languaging

The link to language and languaging is primordial in our understanding and practice of qualitative research, as nothing exists outside the language that makes the object of consideration stand out. Like in a Gestalt, language represents the background against which the figure can emerge. This does not necessary mean that “there is no actual physical world outside discourse but, rather, that the real world only acquires meaning through discourse” (Procter, 2004). For instance, qualitative psychologist see research topics like identity, gender, emotions, psychological concerns, development, or personal and social cognitions, as understandable only in relation to the signifying practices (e.g., interpretations, narratives, discourses, cultures) that make them relevant to participants and observers, as opposed to approaching subjects and topics as isolated objects.

Much more than a communication tool, language and its situated practice (languaging) represent the system of meanings and orders that allow for the specific interpretations or constructions of reality that we encounter in our qualitative inquiries (Maturana & Varela, 1984). The relative and situated focus on languaging allows us to be suspicious, first, of the distinction between appearance and reality, and, second, of referents, that is, words, images, or concepts that are interpreted and used as if their simply coincided with the reality they portrait. Rather than through direct and unquestioned links between representation and reality, in our view, one of the most significant ability of qualitative psychology is that of understanding the links between signifiers and the signified as based on personal, relational, social, and political relationships (Lather, 1997).

All of the authors of this special issue underscore the idea that experiences, phenomena, and events as well as their knowledge and reporting by participants and researchers are located within specific contexts of meaning and power that make the subject of inquiry visible and “problematizable” (Foucault, 1994). Locating knowledge in language and narratives means to question realist and post-positivist orientations, which tend to be dominant in academic and scientific psychologies. Instead of merely assuming the existence of realities (phenomena, events, dynamics, processes, cultures and practices), qualitative psychology focuses on exploring the ways in which some aspects of being human become reified and are made true. In and through language (let’s think, for instance, of the relational and cultural power of psychiatric labels or IQ scores), the lived experience of specific individuals, groups, and communities are often reduced to their descriptions and seen through a realist epistemology, instead of being viewed as social constructions. The recursive interaction between uses of language and social constructions of the real is a major focus for any qualitative researcher interested in human experience.

Qualitative Psychology as a Relational Process

The focus on language and discourses is linked to another key dimension of qualitative psychology: the relational and collaborative view of the process of creating knowledge and acting upon it. Everywhere, but especially in a field like psychology, qualitative research is a relational process that goes beyond objectivity. First, qualitative inquiry takes into account the personal and social meanings associated with events, actions, processes, experiences, or phenomena. Second, by being aware of the location of reality in language, qualitative psychologists underscore that the objects of inquiry are not simply revealed and understood through the application of research methods, but rather the methods and lenses of inquiry create the phenomenon in their terms (Gergen, 2009). Third, whatever we are concerned about is relevant to us because a surrounding set of discourses and orders makes it real and worth exploring for us and for our audiences.

Qualitative research is not a neutral endeavor, located in the sterile setting of the laboratory to maximize the control over variables. Rather, qualitative psychology embraces an ecological (Bateson, 1972) or naturalistic (Guba & Lincoln, 1985) approach to the production of knowledge in which researchers are not merely observers or recorders of a phenomenon, but are inevitably part of the knowledge that is generated in the very process of observing and recording. In other words, we are never just flies on the wall, and we do not simply observe and report without selecting and co-constructing what we see or hear, or what we tell or write. In the process of interacting with or about others, research is socially situated and researchers are culturally and politically positioned.

Often, the awareness that knowledge is co-constructed helps to promote a constructive and, at time, even an activist atmosphere that counters the hegemonic positioning of positivist and post-positivist research (Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011). The collaborative stance is also useful when major differences in power are present between, on the one side, researchers, observers, or experts and, on the other side, participants, subjects, or patients, like in post-colonial or neo-colonial contexts (Tuhiwai Smith, 2001) or mental health settings (Fischer, 1994). Two papers of the special issue address this point. In his contribution, Marco Gemignani shows how research interviewing in qualitative psychology represents a situated co-construction of meanings and memories from the past. Rather than viewing participants’ narratives as unproblematic “data,” he maintains an equal focus on the told and the untold in his work with refugees, thus troubling standard notions of research participants as “informational commodities.” Michael J. Kral’s article examines the relational nature of qualitative research based on his participatory research with Inuit communities in Arctic Canada. The collaborative relation between researchers and community participants, who become co-researchers in fields as psychotherapy, cultural competence, and research, challenges the positivistic legacy of psychology and opens up the possibility of adopting critical and de-colonizing methodologies to create constructivist alternatives of political actions.

Issues of Power, Ethics, and Responsibility

One of the consequences of realizing that “qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011, p. 3; Gadamer, 1960) is that qualitative psychologists assume and take up responsibility for the knowledge they produce. Instead of simply finding, discovering, or observing knowledge in a neutral way, scientific knowledge is seen as resulting from co-constructions among multiple players, like the participants, researchers, audiences, and discourses. This does not mean that knowledge is simply fabricated at one’s discretion in order to fulfill an agenda. Yet, as science and inquiry are embedded in power relations, they are not free from values, ideologies, subjectivities, and agendas that create knowledge and its possibilities.

The awareness of the link between power and knowledge entails a need and a desire to act upon the results of inquiry. In a pragmatic fashion, we (qualitative psychologists) underscore the performative role that knowledge may have to facilitate social and/or personal change. Although the direction of such change is inevitably situated within regimes of truth and dynamics of power and ethics, we tend to be critically aware of the links between power and knowledge. For instance, we do not typically prescribe solutions; we do not necessarily seek out emancipation and social justice. We instead engage in ongoing interpretative dialogues that emphasize the poly-vocality of knowledge in light of personal and cultural as well as epistemological and ontological diversity.

These dialogues are best achieved through collaborations and confrontations among multiple approaches to meaning-making and reality construction. Their possibilities and impossibilities, the deadlocks of interpretations, and the space between agents (e.g., between the researcher and the researched) become opportunities and sites of inquiry (Gemignani, 2011). Instead of a progressive move toward consensus and harmony, the “model” here is that of multiple and uncompromisable voices. In his article in the special issue, Svend Brinkmann gives an example of this process by recounting what can happen when two worldviews and subjectivities meet in a knowledge-creating conversation, in this case between a psychologist-researcher and his friend with whom he lost contact almost ten years ago, when the friend joined a spiritual community.

A key characteristic that sustained the development of this special issue is the critical positioning of the authors. The meaning of the word “critical” is not set in stone. In the last century, almost every discipline within the social sciences has developed a critical turn in reference and reaction to its conservative and canonical mainstream. In this special issue, critical thinking develops along three mainly intertwined routes. First, the authors move toward recognizing the importance of subjectivity, values, and political positions: Here, subjectivity is not interpreted as an obstacle, but as a source of knowledge. Second, most authors of the special issue question the interests they are favoring or impeding through psychological research. As Torrance (2010) wrote,

Politics and science are not separable—the one is implicated in the other, and vice-versa. Many in the scientific community recognize this themselves and similarly raise questions about what research is for, in whose interests it is undertaken, and how knowledge is produced in practice. (p. xlviii)

Finally, contributors understand and interpret inquiry and research methodology as a tool that helps to understand issues of power, politics, gender, ethnicity, control, and exploitation, and to promote social justice through its findings. Along this line of thought, research is understood as an ethical, moral, and political activity (Parker, 2005). For example, in Nelson and Evans’ contribution, the authors show how critical community psychology is driven by values of social justice and power-sharing and is sensitive to emphasizing solidarity and to create transformative social change. Similarly, Maya Lavie-Ajayi explores the use of groups as one way of conducting political research within psychology, and challenging the over-individualistic approach of most psychological studies and theories. To achieve this aim, she suggests that personal and group reflexivity must be part of the research process; this is a way to disrupt the dichotomy between researcher and participants and to change the power relation between them.

Tensions, Contradictions, and Hesitations

Yet, the practice of qualitative research inevitably entails tensions, contradictions, and hesitations. But rather than searching for univocal solutions, political consensus, or hegemonic truths or criteria, we embrace the indeterminacy of knowledge and our understanding of reality as the only possible way of knowing in the social and human sciences (Becker, 1996). At last, in our increasingly multicultural, international, and diverse world, the center and its referents no longer hold everything in order. Qualitative research in psychology is more often found in grassroots movements that deal with the struggles and experiences of everyday lives (like community, feminist, multicultural, school, and social-justice psychologies), than in academic and scientific elites of power (Brinkmann, 2012).

The need for nuanced qualitative studies is an asset for future developments of the field of qualitative psychology, but it points at the same time to the conservative reticence of dominant structures and organizations of psychology to be open to methodological innovations and epistemological diversity. For instance, Mirka Koro-Ljungberg’s article provides an engaging reflection on her experience as grant writer. She addresses the trickeries of grant work in qualitative research and highlights some of the dilemmas and issues involved when working with researchers from other scholarly traditions. Hesitations and contradictions emerge when the qualitative researcher on the one hand wishes to secure the funding, but, on the other, needs to maintain some kind of intellectual integrity in relation to her preferred research approach.

From Research to Inquiry

To the term re-search, we prefer inquiry as we are aware that knowledge does neither always nor only come from searching better or more intensely (Gergen, 2011). We underscore that the process of knowledge creation entails forms of “wandering or going around,” which is the etymological origin of “search.” For an “enquire,” we think of qualitative psychology as inevitably linked to the curiosity and openness of asking about a phenomenon we want to better understand. In this regard, we feel close to George Kelly’s (1955) criticizing of the use of a hermeneutics of suspicion in clinical interviews: “If you don’t know what’s wrong with the patient, ask him. He may tell you.” As qualitative psychologists, we value this invitation to epistemological humility and to collaboration in the process of creating and representing meanings and realities, rather than imposing them (Gergen, 2009).

Similarly, as a way to underscore the constructive nature of interviews or data collections, qualitative psychologists tend to seek answers that focus on processes more than content (the “how” rather than the “what”) and on understandings rather than causal explanations. For example, Lena Lippke and Lene Tanggaard’s contribution to this special issue deals with “muddy” interviews that leave the researcher with a feeling that the research interview slid into something else—for example, coaching, counseling, therapy, or just a really interesting professional conversation. Empirical, experimental researchers argue that in such situations, the researcher needs to switch quickly back to a pure research conversation, while in our opinion, these tense situations are exactly those in which we delve into new territories and gain rich knowledge and insights (Gemignani, 2011; Parker, 2005).

Situating Qualitative Psychology Historically

Wilhelm Wundt, the official founder of psychology as a science in 1879, is famous for his psychophysiological experiments that were precursors to modern experimental psychology, but he also founded psychology as a descriptive and interpretative discipline with his cultural psychological Völkerpsychologie. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic conversations, at the same time a method of treatment and research, can arguably be seen as psychology’s main contribution to qualitative research, and, as significant early figures, we can also mention Frederic Bartlett on remembering, Jean Piaget on cognitive and moral development, and William James on the phenomenology of religious experience. The sad truth is that the large majority of the founding fathers (alas, the mothers only joined later), who are still celebrated in any introductory textbook, are almost completely ignored in their roles of qualitative psychologists.

It was not until 2003—more than 100 years after the publication of a psychological masterpiece of qualitative research: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams—that the American Psychological Association decided that they needed to address qualitative research in psychology (Camic, Rhodes, & Yardley, 2003). Almost at the same time, in 2004, the international journal Qualitative Research in Psychology was launched as the first journal exclusively devoted to qualitative studies in psychology. The fact that psychologists could publish qualitative studies in a journal of their own instead of having to go to neighboring disciplines, like education, communication, or sociology, has without a doubt improved the situation for qualitative psychologists.

Yet, it is still an unpaved road. Perhaps the most challenging threat is the recent neo-positivist turn to evidence-based practice in a global audit culture. Now, practitioners are increasingly required to use only “empirically supported treatments,” which most often is some form of cognitive therapy that might be useful in relation to certain very specific conditions (e.g., phobias), but which is not necessarily ideal for more complex existential, relational, or social problems (e.g., discrimination) in people’s lives. It is no coincidence that psychologists working with narrative, systemic, phenomenological-existential, and social constructionist therapies are more often oriented toward qualitative research, while cognitive and behavioral therapists go to the bookshelves on quantitative studies when looking for inspiration.

Wishes for the Future of Qualitative Psychology

Methodological freedom, experimentation, and creativity are major parts of the future we envision for qualitative psychology. Two contributors in this special issue are particularly intriguing in this respect: Using theatrical and cinematographic languages as a metaphor and following the inspirations by Alfred Hitchcock and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films, Giuseppe Scaratti shows a qualitative research approach oriented to a reflexive hermeneutic in which researchers and participants are involved in conversations, interpretations, and negotiations. His article is an exercise of imagination that opens up a perspective to describe and analyze along with the participants (members of the Roma ethnic group) modes of knowledge production. Similarly, in their article, Rivera, Vélez, Benozzo, and Colón creatively analyze and perform the coming-out letters written by two famous singers from Italy and Puerto Rico. The authors guide the reader to think critically about centered identities, manifestations of coming out discourses, and the roles of glory and the media in the socialization process.

We, the guest editors of this special issue envision a qualitative psychology that will problematize mainstream words used in research, like data, analysis, method, participants, collection, results, or findings. These words contribute to create and reinforce the “old field” of methodological studies and run the risk of inviting a cult for method (i.e., methodolatry). Instead, we need a research that, on one hand, develops an approach rooted in philosophy, history (Bunn, 2011), and cultural studies and, on the other hand, is able to grasp the materiality of experience and life. We hope for a research in which the researcher is present, and bravely address aspects of positioning and reflexivity, instead of hiding beyond a supposed veil of objectivism. Especially in this regard, we would simply hope that psychology will start learning from philosophy of science and will start integrating studies on epistemological, ontological, and ethical diversity in the formation of its students.

As editors of this special issue, we hope for a future in which, instead of talking about “hard” and “soft” methodologies, the field of psychology will be able to evaluate “goodness” in contingent and dialogical ways. We may fear, however, that the field of qualitative research, both inside and outside psychology, becomes torn by internal conflicts between its own hard and soft spokespersons: The hard people being those who want standard qualitative methodologies and universal quality criteria, nothing but CAQDAS analyses and large N studies, thereby mimicking their quantitative colleagues—and the soft people being those who refuse any talk of generalization and validity, and who turn their backs on careful theoretical reflections in the discipline. We need to challenge the assumption of a distinction between hard and soft sciences. We need to acknowledge that qualitative psychology is, and should be, many different things, depending on what one is researching, for whom one is doing one’s inquiries, and on one’s reasons for why it is important to study this specific phenomenon.

Summing up, we must say that characterizing qualitative psychology is—and should be—difficult. It can hardly be a goal to invent a definition that will freeze the discussions and dialogues about the emerging, creatively debated and contradictory field of qualitative psychology. This field should remain as polyphonic as the reality studied by qualitative psychologists itself. Our unity and diversity is unique because is formed by the heterogeneous conceptual legacies that enriched our practices and inquiries. In this special issue, we and the other authors communicate and perform our views of qualitative psychology, which are however ours and do not want to create canons to be followed. In the spirit of inquiry, our interpretations and definitions of the field are explorative, itinerant wanderings: We may leave a path, sketch a map, or—adopting an analogy that is often used in qualitative research—add our piece to the quilt. But, we welcome other voices and we value respectful and egalitarian forms of diversity. In this sense, we agree with Kenneth Gergen (2009): “Knowledge-making depends on discipline, but strong disciplining is neither essential nor welcoming of creating exploration” (p. 214).

In this special issue, qualitative psychologists are coming together to discuss from different countries and conceptual legacies. All of them demand respect to and for their culture. Qualitative psychologies are now flourishing and producing a very appealing atmosphere to create new opportunities to dialogue between researchers, actors and practitioners who are coming to our field from diverse worlds and methodologies. Since the qualitative, human world is made up of all kinds of things—experiences, stories, social constructions, discourses—an adequate qualitative psychology should really be thought of in the plural, as qualitative psychologies of various stripes (e.g., phenomenological, narrative, social constructionist, discursive, etc.). The time for metaphysical fundamentalism should be passed, and a more vibrant, dynamic, and eclectic pragmatism needs to take its place. We all envision a future where artists, performers, audiences, citizens, researchers, poets, patients, and practitioners could share an ambition to build new social orders based on harmonies and social justice. We don’t need a common language or methodology to work together on building and make real such utopia. Qualitative psychologies could cultivate its unity and diversity keeping the differences with tolerance and humility.

Finally, we hope that this special issue about qualitative psychology (or psychologies) represents the heterogeneous nature of the field and will hopefully inspire more collective efforts around the world. Qualitative psychology is not so much concerned with the use of specific methods (qualitative researchers in psychology employ all sorts of methods ranging from interviews to document analysis), and the field can also not be characterized in terms of philosophical paradigms or techniques of analysis (qualitative psychologists identify with many different theoretical orientations), but as a certain kind of stance and sensitivity. Qualitative psychologists are interested in people as people (not as variables, brains, cognitive structures—but as people). This is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the qualitative stance.