Making a clearing: Qualitative research in anglophone Canadian psychology.

Abstract

Special Issue Canadian pioneers rid their homestead lands of bush and rock, creating clearings fit for farming. Similarly, a clearing is being established in Canadian psychology. The term refers to a wide variety of methods other than the positivistic ones favoured in most psychological enquiry. These methods include empirical phenomenology (Giorgi, 1970), grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), discourse analysis (e.g., Potter & Wetherell, 1987), conversation analysis (Labov & Fanshell, 1977), narrative analysis (e.g., Polkinghorne, 1995), and action research (e.g., Reason & Bradbury, 2001), among others. These methods challenge the objectivism prized in conventional enquiry. Most researchers attempt to control for the subjectivity of self and other through procedures such as random sampling, the control-group experiment and the use of objective questionnaires, with all procedures eventuating in quantified results that are analyzed statistically. Qualitative researchers are sceptical of this objectivism. We maintain that it keeps distant the complexities and nuances of what it means to be human, both in terms of those being researched and those doing the research. Thus, given that people use language more than any other form of symbolization to understand themselves and others, we prefer to stay within that mode in our enquiries and analyses. Moreover, we try to take into account our own subjectivity as researchers and positively value making it, as we understand it, available to our readers. Also, we study people and our products intensively more than extensively, which limits the number of people we can study, in turn limiting the generalizations that can be made of our understandings. More fundamentally, although some of us subscribe to a realist epistemology as a way of maintaining links with convention, most of us identify either totally or in part with relativist epistemology and accept the uncertainty that goes with it. The upshot is that qualitative research occupies a middle ground between the sciences and the humanities, which goes against established research practice in psychology and most related social and health science disciplines. At present, qualitative research in Canadian psychology is beginning to take root in some universities and research organizations. Most of the contributions to this Special Issue reflect this development in Anglophone Canadian psychology, while one of them looks at the rise in English-language publications of qualitative research worldwide. There are six articles in all. Leading off is Janet Stoppard who narrates her turn to qualitative research, which led to the development of a course in it that has been adopted by her university's graduate program in psychology. Along the way she addresses the epistemological and methodological principles involved in qualitative research from a discourse analytic standpoint, which helps to frame the ensuing contributions. The next article by Michael Kral, Kate Burkhardt, and Sean Kidd provides examples of the conduct of qualitative research, mainly of an action research kind. They give interesting accounts of work with street youth in Toronto and Vancouver, Inuit prison inmates, and Inuit people concerned about the epidemic of suicides in the Nunavut territory of Canada. The three case studies compellingly demonstrate how such participatory action research is made integral to the lives of those to whom it is addressed. The third article by Kimberly Watson, Althea Monteiro, and myself gives the returns from a study of the rise of qualitative research in psychology and related disciplines in the English-speaking world during the 20th century. …