Review of Qualitative health psychology: Theories and methods.

Abstract

MICHAEL MURRAY and KERRY CHAMBERLAIN (EDS.) Qualitative Health Psychology: Theories and Methods Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999, 272 pages (ISBN 0-7619-5661-1, US$25.95, Softcover) Reviewed by CLARE MACMARTIN Qualitative research in health psychology is relatively new but already displays considerable vigour. The 15 chapters of the present book offer wide-ranging examples of the contributions that qualitative research can make to the field of health psychology; they also encourage reflection and debate on the positivist, quantitative perspective that has traditionally dominated health psychology and underpins its epistemological alliance with biomedicine. The book is divided into three parts. The first is Constructing Health and Illness through Language. Editors Michael Murray and Kerry Chamberlain open with an informative chapter that introduces upcoming contributions in the context of the history of psychology as a quantitative science, the relationship between traditional health psychology and medicine, and social-constructionist challenges to quantitative research. The intent is not to dismiss the value of quantitative research but to question reliance on a single methodology. The editors argue that health psychology is best advanced through the promotion of multiple research techniques, including qualitative approaches. The rest of Part I draws on various ideas from social constructionism and discursive psychology that question the positivist view of health and illness as objectivist entities. In Chapter 2, Alan Radley treats health and illness as experiences that become tangible in different social realms or spheres of everyday life. He characterizes the qualitative interview not as a neutral conduit for the transmission of information but as communicative interaction conditioned by the relationship between the interviewer and the respondent. In Chapter 3, Lucy Yardley considers how material-discursive approaches can overcome the mind-body dualism that has hampered traditional theorizing in health psychology. She grounds her argument in qualitative research on dizziness. In Chapter 4, Michael Murray looks at accounts of illness as narratives, claiming that meaning-making emerges out of the social context of teller and hearer. In Chapter 5, Mandy Morgan adopts a Foucauldian discursive stance, demonstrating the contributions that such an approach can make to health psychology, including the articulation of reflexive concerns about the enabling and constraining effects of psychological discourse on our understanding of health. In Chapter 6, MaryJane Paris Spink integrates discursive and communicative theories to argue that making sense of illness requires consideration of two levels: the local face-to-face interactions in which illness is represented and the collective cultural-historical context that provides the repertoires or discourses for dialogical representation. As an illustration, Spink reports analyses of interactions in risk workshops on AIDS, showing how the collective construction of sexual identities has implications for primary prevention. In Chapter 7, Jane Ussher discusses feminist approaches to qualitative health research. She uses Premenstrual Syndrome as an example to compare and contrast the dominant strands of feminist theory and epistemology (feminist empiricism, postmodernism, critical realism, and standpoint theory) in terms of theory and research design in the investigation of women's health. Ussher considers the metatheoretical, theoretical, and methodological commonalities and differences among these strands and nonfeminist qualitative research. Parts II and III share similar concerns about methodology. The second part, Conversing About Health and Illness, emphasizes contextual issues. In Chapter 8, Cynthia Matheson discusses interviewing in the context of health and illness, treating it as a process of story-building. The forms and content of different interview approaches are introduced, as are contextual concerns such as the establishment of rapport. …