Carla Willig
Professor of Psychology at City University of London

She has a long-standing interest in qualitative research methods and their usage in psychology. Ever since she chose to use a qualitative research method for her doctoral research in the late 1980s when such approaches were still very much at the fringes within the discipline of psychology, she has engaged with questions about the nature, status and legitimacy of knowledge claims. She has used a variety of qualitative research methods in her own research, including grounded theory methodology (for her doctoral research in the 1980s), discourse analysis (throughout the 1990s) and more recently phenomenological research methods (2000 onwards). She is currently conducting qualitative metasynthesis research into the experience of living with terminal cancer. She is also exploring dual focus methodology by combining Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) with Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA).

Her most recent books include 'Qualitative Interpretation and Analysis in Psychology' (2012, McGraw Hill)  ‘Introducing Qualitative Research in Psychology’ (2013, 3^rd edition, McGraw Hill/Open University Press), and 'The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology' (2017, with Wendy Stainton Rogers, London: Sage). 

Bridges and Boundaries: Diversity with a Purpose

Qualitative research has many different faces. It can look like philosophy (for example, when  it problematises the notion of ‘truth’), it can read like fiction or memoir (such as when it presents narrative accounts of subjective experiences), it can resemble critical literature reviewing (when it uses metasynthesis) or look very much like a clinical case study formulation (for example, when using psychosocial approaches). Furthermore, anything that captures human experience can be used as qualitative data, and there are countless ways in which such data can be analysed, with new types of analysis emerging all the time. The kinds of insights and observations that can be generated on the basis of qualitative analysis can take numerous forms ranging from realist claims about the occurrence of social processes in the real world at one end of the epistemological spectrum, to relativist accounts of how a particular version of reality has been talked into being on the other. In the face of such diversity, it can be difficult to identify the boundaries that demarcate qualitative research as a discipline distinct from other scholarly pursuits and social engagements. Although there are those who argue that such demarcation is not a desirable move and that there is no need for disciplinary boundaries around ‘qualitative research’, I do see some value in reflecting on what makes qualitative research ‘research’. In this talk I address the question of how we may decide whether something is qualitative research as opposed to other kinds of meaning-making activity concerned with human experience. At a time of increasing diversification of approaches in qualitative psychology and the emergence of a post-qualitative critique of the very notion of qualitative research methodology (conventional or otherwise), I want to reflect on the desirability of describing qualitative research as ‘research’, and to tentatively propose criteria which will allow us to differentiate between qualitative research and other pursuits that are concerned with exploring human experience and its diverse meanings and possibilities.