Principles and practices: An empirical examination of qualitative research in the Journal of Counseling Psychology.

Abstract

This article examines the 50 qualitative studies published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology (JCP) over a 15-year period in light of methodological principles advocated by qualitative theorists. The match between practices and principles is not high. In the modal investigation, coders (most of whom did not interact with or observe participants) worked from transcripts of a 60-min interview conducted in a setting convenient for the researcher. Researchers endorsed the need to bracket their own subjective experiences and used auditors to enhance reproducibility of findings. Trend analyses suggest that qualitative research in JCP has tended to drift further from qualitative principles over time. The authors consider the implications of these findings for the potential of qualitative methods to inform science and practice in counseling psychology.

Brand personification and symbolic consumption among ethnic minority teenage consumers: An empirical study

“…Besides, this methodological stance provides rich and valuable insight into the discourse of contemporary consumerism and acknowledges consumers in their culturally constructed world (Goulding, 1999). This corroborates the contention that this research paradigm is aimed at having a deep understanding of the respondents based on their unique characteristics by interpreting their actions on the basis of their subjective frame of reference (William, 2000;Hoyt and Bhati, 2007;Collis, and Hussey, 2014). Specifically, choosing depth-interview for this study among many other data collection methods allowed the respondents to explore the subject of study at length which is consistent with the claim of Thompson (1997) and McKhardt (2005).…”

Integration or Assimilation? Locating Qualitative Research in Psychology

“…In cultural anthropology, it is noted that such intercultural contacts frequently result in changes in the cultural patterns of one or both groups-a process called acculturation (Berry 2000). Hoyt and Bhati (2007) compared the struggle to legitimize qualitative work in a discipline dominated by quantitative thinking to a contact between two cultures in which members of the nondominant (qualitative) culture may feel pressure to accommodate to the dominant (quantitative) value system, perhaps sacrificing some of what is valuable in their own cultural heritage. Given that we consider the qualitative and quantitative research communities as cultural groups, it is natural to look to theories of intergroup relations as a source of possible explanations of the processes that accompany cross cultural contact and the possible implications of it.…”

“…Hoyt and Bhati (2007) conceptualized the two different philosophical traditions inherent in quantitative and qualitative research not only as epistemological differences but also as representative of two fundamentally different cultures. DeWaal (2001) noted that culture, broadly defined, refers to socially transmitted knowledge, habits, and skills that constitute a specific way of negotiating and understanding one's context.…”

“…This change has been documented across all areas of psychology, including counseling (Hoyt & Bhati 2007), health (Hodges et al 2007), school (Michell 2004), clinical (Rennie, Watson & Monteiro 2002), evaluation (Mark 2002), sport and exercise (Weinberg & Gould 2007) and industrial-organizational (Cassell & Symon 2006). The last two decades have seen an explosion of volumes on qualitative methods in the social sciences (e.g., Brewer & Hunter 1989;Cresswell 1998;Denzin & Lincoln 2000Taylor & Bogdan 1998), including many specifically addressing the utility of these methods for psychological research (e.g., Camic, Rhodes & Yardley 2003;Kopala & Suzuki 1999;McLeod 2001).…”

Changing the terms of the debate: Quantitative methods in explicitly interpretive research

“…At the same time, other psychologists hold the opposite view, that the only way for a human science to proceed fruitfully is by employing qualitative methods (e.g., Stam, 2006), because using quantitative methods often trivializes, distorts, or ignores meaningful psychological phenomena in context. Furthermore, the idea that qualitative and quantitative methods differ in a fundamental sense does not only figure in debates about which one of these approaches is the right way to proceed (see, e.g., Hoyt & Bhati, 2007); it also can be seen in arguments in favor of methodological pluralism, which contend that we need natural science methods to study some aspects (lawful, mechanical) of psychological phenomena and human sciences methods to study other aspects (meaningful; e.g., Dawson, Fischer, & Stein, 2006;Slife & Hopkins, 2005).…”