Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section

The Section played an active role in the Society's Annual Conference at York. We were delighted to hear David Rennie as one of the keynote speakers at the conference. His talk, entitled ‘Toward a Meta-Methodology of Qualitative Research’, tackled the difficult issue of different epistemological positions in qualitative research. He argued that the diversity of relativist and realist epistemologies adopted by qualitative researchers effectively limits the collective contribution that they are able to make to psychology, and put forward methodical hermeneutics as a tentative proposal for developing a meta-methodology for qualitative research. This was a fascinating tour-de-force and made an important contribution to debate in qualitative psychology. The Section organized a related symposium on Theory and Qualitative Research, which had presentations by Jonathan Potter, Lucy Yardley, Robert Elliott, and Jonathan Smith, with Anna Madill as discussant. The papers and subsequent discussion were interesting, lively and provocative in their different takes on the role of theory in qualitative research.

Another event in November 2007 was organized together with the ESRC Real Life Methods node of the National Centre for Research Methods. Two talks, by Brendan Gough and Anna Madill, looked at ‘Rethinking the qualitative interview: some thoughts from social psychology’. Brendan Gough’s talk, ‘Psychoanalytically informed qualitative research’, began by reviewing recent attempts by social psychologists to refashion qualitative interviewing along psychoanalytic lines. He presented an example of psychoanalytically-informed interviewing based on his Real Life Methods project on father-son resemblances. Anna Madill’s talk, ‘Is interview data any use? Responding to (indirect) complaints’ considered recent critiques of semi-structured interview data. She used the ubiquitous phenomenon of the indirect complaint to examine how semi-structured interviews differ from spontaneous conversation.

This year the Section awarded its first prize in the seminar competition, which provides financial and other support for an event related to the use of qualitative methods. The award went to Belinda Brooks-Gordon and Nollaig Frost at Birkbeck, University of London, for a one-day seminar entitled Pluralism in Qualitative Research. The seminar will be held in March, 2008, and will present the results of four different qualitative analyses of the same piece of data. There will also be plenty of discussion about the study and issues such as subjectivity in qualitative research. The details of next year’s seminar competition are already available and posted on our website, with a deadline of 29 February 2008, and we anticipate continuing to run the competition in future years.

A new award has just been established for scholars who are within five years of graduation with a PhD. The Prize for Outstanding Research by an Early Career Scholar will be awarded for the best published paper that either advances the field of qualitative research methods in psychology, or which makes good use of qualitative research methods to develop theory or practice in any area of psychology. The prize is £200 plus registration fee and travel expenses for the Section’s inaugural conference in September 2008. Again, full details are on our website with a deadline of 29 February 2008.

There have been some changes in committee membership this year. Sue Alexander, who was our postgraduate representative, stood down during the year. We are grateful to her for providing a postgraduate perspective on Section activities. At the moment, this position remains vacant. Two new committee members also joined during the year. Peter Branney was elected unopposed at the AGM in September, and will serve for a term of three years. He has taken over the role of Newsletter Editor from Sheila Keegan, who successfully edited the first four issues of the newsletter, and has now taken on the new role of Press Officer. The second new committee member is Brendan Gough, who was co-opted onto the committee in his role as chair of the Section’s inaugural conference, to be held in 2008. All committee members have been working very hard to support the Section and its activities, both publicly and behind the scenes, and I would like to thank them for their dedication and professionalism.

We are always keen to hear from our members so please do get in touch if you have any comments on Section activities, would like to become more involved, or would simply like to suggest an event for us to organize. Further information about all Section activities, including copies of previous newsletters and details of how to join our electronic mailing lists, are on the Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section website.