The Listening Guide: Replacing judgment with curiosity.

Abstract

This introduction describes the method and the methodology-the way of working and the underlying logic-of the Listening Guide (LG). It brings into focus three aspects of the Guide that are commonly overlooked or misunderstood: (a) the framing of the entire research process as a relational activity, (b) the distinction between listening for a voice and identifying a theme, and (c) the attention to an associative logic and to evidence of dissociation. By directing the researcher to listen for multiple voices and track their interplay, the LG resists the binary logic of coding categories. In addition to further explicating the method, the special issue provides examples of how the LG has been used with a variety of questions and in a range of contexts; it highlights innovations in use of the method and underscores the radical potential in replacing judgment with curiosity.

Thank You for Hearing My Voice – Listening to Women Combat Veterans in the United States and Israeli Militaries

“…It is a way of asserting dominance and also an expression of disrespect.” Our aim was thus to trace the soldiers’ main narratives and to disaggregate them, while at the same time acknowledging the veterans’ complex, multidimensional and diverse experiences. Furthermore, Gilligan and Eddy (2017 , 2021) , in their recent study, indicate that health professionals have begun to research and to write about how doctors, nurses and therapists can listen to their patients more effectively, and this study thus forms part of this new corpus of research. It is our hope that we have managed to listen sufficiently closely to the veterans’ stories and that this research will alert societies, therapists, and military institutions to the fact that they are not always listening closely to veterans’ experiences and are not always really interested in what actually ails them.…”

“…In applying this methodology, we “listen to the plot,” as Gilligan guides us, by listening closely to the narratives. According to Gilligan (2015 , p. 71), this listening “directs the researcher’s attention to the landscape of the interview or text (who is there, who or what is missing, are there repeated words, salient themes, striking metaphors or symbols, emotional hot-spots, gaps, or ruptures) and to the stories that are told.” This methodology thus enables us to disaggregate the personal and the political and to challenge the often taken-for-granted concepts that preserve hegemonic and/or patriarchal power relations ( Gilligan, 2015 ; Harel-Shalev and Daphna-Tekoah, 2016 ; Arnd-Linder et al, 2018 ; Thompson et al, 2018 ; Gilligan and Eddy, 2021 ; Vaandering and Reimer, 2021 ).…”

A Multi‐layered Approach to Patient Agency: Applying the Listening Guide to a Patient's Narratives

“…It contains a series of successive ‘listenings’: listening for the plot; constructing ‘I‐poems’; and listening for contrapuntal voices. In our reading, the LG's focus on listening for polyphony, associative logic and musicality in speech (Gilligan & Eddy, 2021) resonates with psychoanalytic practice and theory that considers listening in a non‐judgemental manner as key and approaches persons as ambivalent and self‐contradictory. Since a theoretical interpretation enhances a deeper understanding of the data and improves the quality of a study (Moernaut, 2021), the obtained results were linked back to the theory concerning the postmodern story notion and psychoanalysis.…”

Foregrounding fathers: Reflections on a psychoanalytic research process.

“…A psychoanalytic interview approach leaves space for surprises: For anxieties, for what is unsaid, for hesitancies and contradictions, and for potentially listening to what may be unconscious as well as what is conscious (Cartwright, 2004; Hollway & Jefferson, 2012; Holmes, 2013). This is no doubt the case for other qualitative methodologies as well (see Gilligan & Eddy, 2021), but a psychoanalytic methodology puts this front and center, and actively encourages research participants to reflect on that which is surprising or unexpected. We found it particularly useful to analyze how fathers engaged with the interview process and how they came across unexpected discoveries along the way.…”