Epistemological and methodological frameworks

I tried to be honest in this book. But honesty is another can of worms: what do we mean by it? There’s honesty as emotional truth and honesty as factual accuracy, and it turns out that the two are incompatible. (Fitzpatrick, 2010, p. 4)

Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote these words when, as a historian writing a memoir of her own childhood and family life, she confronted the gaps between her enduring, self-

defining memories and the documentary record. As a memoirist she opted for emotional truth – to tell her story – but with some reference to disputed facts and alternate accounts. The issue of emotional (or narrative) truth versus historical accuracy has also been at the core of many of the debates and developments within qualitative methodology (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, 2000) and within psychoanalysis (Schafer, 1992; Spence, 1982). The issues concern the framing of the research endeavour and the meaning of data, how we understand or interpret what people tell us and how we then report on that understanding.

Charmaz (2003, 2009) addressed these issues in contrasting what she termed, somewhat polemically, ‘objectivist’ grounded theory and constructivist grounded theory. The constructivist approach assumes multiple realities (rather than the one external reality of the ‘objectivist’ position), interactive construction of experience (rather than discovery) and that the researcher’s values and positions affect process

and outcome (thus challenging the concept of the neutral observer). Furthermore constructivist grounded theory views knowledge as partial, relativistic, situated in time and space, and aims for ‘interpretive understanding’ (Charmaz, 2009).

Spence (1982) examined similar issues in the field of psychoanalysis. He argued that there was a tension within Freud’s writings between the idea of excavating historical truth (the archaeology metaphor) and the actual practice of constructing narrative truth, which gave sequence and coherence but whose link to historical fact was less than certain. Spence (1982) referred to the analyst as ‘a pattern maker not a pattern finder’ (p.293). He acknowledged the existence of narrative facts (‘plain’ narrative), events that have occurred and are readily verifiable, but the significance and meaning of such events and the connections between them are not ‘plain’. Moreover he

cautioned that the push for narrative closure can lead us to ‘prematurely streamline’ chaotic experience (p.23).

As Kvale (2003) has argued, qualitative methods made significant contributions to psychology long before the recent surge of interest in applying qualitative paradigms developed in the social sciences. For Freud, psychoanalysis was a method of research as well as a method of treatment. Just as dreams were the ‘royal road to the

unconscious’ of the individual patient, psychoanalysis was an avenue toward understanding human nature. The influence of the psychoanalytic method extended beyond the treatment setting to academic research contexts. Kvale (2003) traced the role of ‘psychoanalytically inspired’ (p.280) interview research in some of the classic and most influential psychological studies of last century, notably Piaget’s studies of children’s thought processes, Adorno and colleagues’ study of the authoritarian personality and the Hawthorne studies of human relations in industry. He identified aspects of the psychoanalytic method that were common to interview-based research studies, notably an open mode of interviewing that allowed participants to talk freely, interpretation of meaning closely based on what was said (and not said) rather than on predetermined categories, and a tolerance for ambiguity. He noted important

differences as well, in particular the treatment aims and extended timeframe of psychoanalysis, and the associated level of emotional intensity within the analyst- patient relationship. It could be argued that these differences place significant limits on adapting psychoanalytic method to qualitative research.

Nevertheless, coming from a clinical psychology background, for this researcher the clinical interview served as an entry point to qualitative methodology. A clinical interview (distinguished from a specifically diagnostic one) aims at understanding internal psychological experience and interpersonal processes, the person beyond the diagnosis (McWilliams, 2002; Sullivan, 1954). Both the clinical interview and the qualitative research interview aim to understand experience and arrive at meaning. An inclusive, open-minded mode of listening and an awareness of the interactional nature of the interview are at the core of both. Broadly speaking both are concerned with understanding the meaning which people give to their experience. The researcher (like the therapist) aims to enter into the other person’s frame of reference, seeks to

understand the other person’s experience, while monitoring the influence of his or her own frame of reference, own role in, and experience of, the interaction. (Of course the purpose of the interview and the roles of the interviewee and interviewer are different in research compared to clinical interviewing, and hence the ‘contract’ between the two is also different.)

However, despite the apparent fit between psychological practice and qualitative methodology, some researchers report significant strains in trying to apply methods derived from anthropology, sociology or philosophy to the study of psychological processes. Hollway (2001, 2009) argued that qualitative methods derived from social sciences gave insufficient attention to less conscious psychological processes and privileged social identities over internal dynamics. In a related argument, Willig (2001) noted that grounded theory was originally designed to study social processes and wondered whether its approach to theory-building could be applied to

psychological processes. In contrast Wertz et al. (2011) recently described the application of five qualitative research methodologies to a psychological topic, namely the experience of ‘misfortune’ in the form of serious life-changing illness. Smith (1996) developed interpretative phenomenological analysis at least partly as a way of bringing phenomenological method into health psychology.

There is a diverse range of qualitative approaches and the literature tends to focus on what characterises one method compared to another. However Wertz et al. (2011) recently identified foundational commonalities among five methodological

approaches (including phenomenology, constructivist grounded theory and narrative methods) as well as further potentially common constituents. Most of these

commonalities concerned the process of analysing the data. Interestingly Braun and Clarke (2006) recently argued that thematic analysis is a foundational method which should be regarded as a method in its own right. They saw it as a flexible method that can be applied across a range of theoretical and epistemological frameworks. Braun and Clarke’s (2006) account of thematic analysis is quite consistent with the analytic commonalities identified by Wertz et al. (2011). They noted however, that while the method is adaptable across frameworks, it is important to specify the researcher’s epistemological position.

In the light of poststructuralist emphasis on language and narrative, Hollway (2006) questioned whether we have gone too far in focusing on socially mediated realities, multiple truths and the way discourse and the researcher’s choices construct meaning and subjectivity. Taken too far this focus may obscure rather than illuminate

experience. Discussing James and Joyce Robertson’s 1950s films of children in hospital (Robertson, 1970), Hollway (2006) argued that ‘attachment theory mediated the evidence because it influenced what they noticed and then how the Robertsons filmed and edited it, but it did not create the children’s distress’ (p.472). Recognising the reality of the children’s distress (without disavowing the significance of

constructivist processes) leads to what Hollway (2006) and others call a ‘critical realist’ epistemology.

The current study adopts a critical realist position. The researcher understands that the participant’s experience, as recounted in the interview, has been constructed and reconstructed in memory and in language, and that construction has been shaped not only by the process of putting experience into words but also by emotional needs, research context and the interactional processes within the interview. Despite these processes of constructing and reconstructing, at its core the experience is real – in the inner life of the informant and in the here and now of the interview. The historical referents of the present day account are also real though they are interpreted through the lenses of time and internal mental life, which, as Fitzpatrick (2010) found, will likely mean discrepancies with the ‘documentary record’. Following the interview there is another process of constructing - the researcher’s process of analysing the

data and developing a research report. Here fidelity to the subject matter is an important criterion (Wertz et al., 2011).

The current researcher considered constructivist grounded theory as an overarching methodological framework and this is reflected in the research insofar as it aims to build knowledge from the ground up, employ inductive reasoning and make links to theory. However it was not possible, for practical reasons, to do theoretical sampling and, as indicated above, the interpretive stance is more critical realist than fully constructivist. The study adopts thematic analysis as its basic data analytic strategy.