THE PROBLEM OF QUALITATIVE METHODS APPLICABLE IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONALITY

Abstract

The article argues the historical confrontation and the mutual additions of qualitative and quantitative methods in psychology, and it presents the important systematized methodological aspects as for the application of qualitative methods in personality psychology. These aspects are: substantiation of qualitative research as the most appropriate methodology for the holistic study of a person as a personality from the standpoint of the systematic approach; combination of the diagnostics and psychological influences during dialogic interactions of a psycho­logist-researcher and a psychologist-practitioner (as two roles of one person) with a client in a psychotechnical situation; the characteristic features of qualitative research (holism, identified meanings and their interpretations, contextuality, reflexivity, interactivity, absence of directives, inductive approach to data, correspondence to situations, attention to individual cases, etc.); the types of qualitative studies - diagnostic, exploitative, verificatory or exploitative-verificatory - and variants of their combination; classification of methodological approaches that help chose certain qualitative methods based on their philosophical foundations, research purpose and objects, cognition principles and technologies; the methodological principles of qualitative research – conceptual sensi­tivity, interpretive reconstruction, reflexivity; the validity criteria for qualitative methods with taking into account a research stage (a level in the structure) – planning and data collecting, their analysis, data interpretation and presentation, ethical validity – and the structure of a final scientific work prepared by the research results (requirements for introduction, literature review and theoretical analysis, an empirical part, conclusions, possible applications). The conclusion is made about the relevance of qualitative researches at the modern meta-modern stage of the psychological science on personality