‘You start to break it down a bit and play around…’

I'm going to take a provocative, playful, pushing boundaries approach to the interview, in true post-qualitative fashion… I was very interested that you took that approach to giving your keynote.  

I think my career stage, and Covid lockdown, afforded me an opportunity to rethink established practices performed by myself and within the community. It was an opportunity to think differently, to get into literature that I would normally not have time to read. I had come across some talks and papers on post-qualitative work, and I thought ‘this is happening outside psychology, why are we not engaging with this?’ There are good reasons for that – a lot of it is fairly impenetrable to people outside that clique – but nonetheless, there were some really interesting and important ideas in there that needed to be engaged with by us. Some qualitative psychologists were doing similar things anyway, without using that terminology.

So, I think because of the level of maturity that qualitative psychology has reached, it’s classic… when something's established, you start to break it down a bit and play around and say, ‘I’m going to do it a different way’.

That’s the discipline, and yourself personally?

They come together… in qualitative research, the personal is engaged, either explicitly or implicitly.  You may as well do it with your cards on the table.

It was interesting and important that in the talk you recognised your privilege in being able to do that… as a professor at a certain career stage, to be able to stand up there and say ‘is that a load of rubbish? I don't know.’ That was in relation to your lockdown puppy, Leo: you'd written a post-qualitative piece about him as an ‘apposite materialisation of post-qualitative endeavour, full of contradictory impulses, tendencies and effects’.

Yes, I thought that was a nice parallel to human emotionality and investment in the research that we do and in connecting with other people generally. One of the things the post-qualitative does is link us back to our animal nature, which is kind of glossed over and in a very intellectual world.

Social and qualitative psychologists in the UK since the 1990s have been trying to grapple with how we move beyond discourse. Discourse takes us so far, but it produces a psychology which is very depersonalised and dehumanised sometimes. So it’s about bringing bodies and materiality back into the equation in ways that are connected to the symbolic or the semiotic: both together at the same time.

You said that a post-qualitative approach does prioritise theory. If I'm really honest, that's often been my reaction to some qualitative research, and perhaps to the stuff you talked about in particular – is it genuinely grounded in theory? Is it anything more than just writing? Are you a frustrated author?

The phrase ‘just writing’ is interesting. Writing is central to what we do as academics, whether you're qualitative or experimental. In the field of the sociology of scientific knowledge, scientific practice has been interrogated, right through from design and experiments, carrying them out to writing them up. All the human interaction that goes on, the judgments and personal investments, that all works collectively to produce the scientific paper at the end. But, you know, scientific psychologists don't talk about that themselves. They repress, or suppress, the subjective and the introspective.

So ‘just writing’ is a very provocative phrase, because writing is what we do. But we don't talk about it as a craft, it’s something that we're not trained to do. We’re trained in methods and theory, we're not trained in writing. Why not?

I'm always talking about writing as a craft in the magazine! But it’s interesting that you’ve said a lot of what is written in this approach is quite illegible and jargonistic, but you're quite comfortable to say that writing should sometimes challenge, it can be hard work sometimes, because that encourages us beyond positions.

To me, it doesn't make sense to write for yourself and not care how it comes across. But at the other extreme, it's not fruitful to write in a very traditional way. I mean, that can work very well. But if you introduce other elements, where the dissemination is more creative, it can add value. It can provoke responses that otherwise wouldn't emerge. Playing with format, and trying to be creative, can work very well, but you have to be very careful. It's a balancing act.

I'm always wary of ‘the IKEA effect’, that we just value something because we've had to work hard at it, and the ‘Guru Effect’ that obscurity inspires awe… we think it must be amazingly complex just because we don’t understand it. But actually, that shouldn't lead us to write in a traditional, formulaic way… all the great writers will have pushed the boundaries. The same in Psychology – even great writers like Mick Billig aren’t always simple and obvious. It's about making you think.

Where do you see a post-qualitative approach sitting in terms of open science?

That's a good question. It's not something I've delved into very much. Peter Branney, who was one of my students, has been pushing that forward for qualitative psychology. I think because open science comes from quantitative science, it's difficult to translate it perfectly for qualitative. The notion of reproducibility is problematic from a social constructionist perspective, because we emphasise the situatedness of research. It doesn't make sense to assume that you can repeat the same context, reproduce it perfectly, even if that's desirable – which it probably isn't from a constructionist point of view. And then there are issues around putting interview transcripts online, making them publicly available, in terms of anonymity and confidentiality, although that can be addressed.

It's hard enough getting qualitative research recognised properly by the Research Excellence Framework… am I right in thinking you’re the only qualitative person on the panel?

I was this time, although other panel members had some experience with qualitative methods. I'm hoping that next time there will be another one. We’ve got Psychology situated in Main Panel A, which is science and medicine. So right away, people at the social and qualitative end of Psychology are at a disadvantage in that environment. The REF process is very professional: peer review, everything's taken seriously, there are no pre-judgments, we have unconscious bias training – not just about protected characteristics, but also type of theory, methodology, approach, our own personal prejudices, we have to really check those. Every piece of work is assessed by at least two colleagues. So the process is very robust, and fair. But there is a real question about where social and qualitative research should be submitted. My preference would be that it all goes into Psychology and that we make changes from within the discipline, to push for more recognition and validation of qualitative work. But that's a tough ask for a unit which is top heavy with neuroscience.

So your concern is that we’ll just increasingly fragment.

This came out of the last REF exercise, this kind of discussion. I’m not sure we’ve solved it. I’m curious to see what the new REF rules will be for next time. For example, impact has gone from 20 to 25% in terms of weighting, and that might go up to 30. That's interesting, because a lot of the impact case studies in Psychology and elsewhere are underpinned by qualitative research. That came out of the actual report this time. And there might be moves to make interdisciplinary work more recognised. The panel might be broader next time, that's a possibility.

To move to a specific focus of your research, I’m interested in your ‘imagined work with my Da’. It got me thinking about masculinities and the implications for engaging with psychological research and interventions. Do you think masculinity impacts on how men relate to psychology at the broadest level?

I've done a lot of work on male mental health. I did a report for the WHO a couple years ago with a colleague in Latvia. We looked at how expectations for men constrained how they manage their own mental health, how they sought help. Arguably, services aren’t really designed to engage men in positive ways. Think about therapeutic spaces: a lot of the staff are female, the spaces are feminised. Some men might be OK with that, but a lot of men want something different.

In a positive sense, what’s emerged more recently are interventions which are based in communities, which might not be badged as mental health – they might have a physical activity focus, or music or arts, which then pulls men in. It might have local community members advocating through working as peer mentors. There’s evidence that men access those kinds of initiatives in a more positive way, and also some online approaches where men remain anonymous.

The online approach isn't going to work with your Dad! You said even trying to talk to your Dad about what you wanted to do, or to give him a form to fill in… what forms even mean to a man like your Dad… that’s interesting.

I think that's the wider issue for disadvantaged groups and communities, where official forms are looked on with some suspicion, perhaps for good reason.

One of your students talked yesterday about Army veterans, and how the civilian world, and presumably the world of science, was more scary to them than the military.

How might you actually conduct research with your dad, using post-qualitative ideas?

In a paper I published in 2021, Imagining a vibrant [post]Qualitative Psychology via ‘Experimentation’, I imagined how I could do this, and it doesn’t necessarily involve meeting with him! For example, in the keynote lecture I presented what I called a ‘dad fragment’ – a short piece of creative writing based on free association and informed by memories. So, for any topic, getting creative can form part of the research process, thinking and writing differently informed by pertinent theory, art and literature – and by your own embodied recollections and reflections.

How far are you looking to push a post-qualitative approach? In your talk you said, ‘what this means is there's no need for actual data, there's no need for ethics’…

I was being a bit flippant. But many funders – like the ESRC, NIHR etc – want patient and public engagement, they want impact. And they are very open to methods of data collection, analysis and dissemination which recruit community members in the process, and which deliver in various formats with participants at the centre. Often, with funded research these days, we end up with exhibitions in the community with images and videos of what happened in the project. Or data might be turned into theatre performance. It's not uncommon to recruit artists or musicians into the project from day one, as consultants. So this kind of thing is happening anyway. It's not called post-qualitative, there’s a parallel drive towards arts-based research and dissemination, and community action research. All these things coalesce around PPI and being creative around what you do with data to make it meaningful for the people who you're focusing on and working with.

Like you said yesterday, it's all happening in a strange space, a liminal space… but that's the strength of Psychology, it can reach out to those slightly borderline places and pull in the best bits and amalgamate them into what we do. Exciting time to be a psychologist.

Yes, I think so.