Overview of qualitative methods

The view of research methods in psychology depends not just on where you sit but when. If you sat, for example, on the shores of the new science in the United States in the 1970s, you would see experimental methods as far as the eye could see, whereas if you took in the sights of European psychology 50 years before, the work of Jung and Freud and their celebrated studies of non-random samples of N = 1 would have dominated the view. As psychology matures, it is beginning to expand its toolbox, adding to the kit rather than abandoning tools as it progresses. In this chapter, we examine some the qualitative tools, and more generally, the qualitative approach. This approach has been used to tackle the same problems that ‘traditional’ experimental or other quantitative methods allow us to tackle, but in some cases it offers an angle to tackle research problems that are qualitatively different to ‘traditional’ research questions. For the conventionally trained psychology researcher, qualitative research methods can be shrouded in translucent jargon, something this chapter will avoid.