Listening Between the Lines: How a Theoretical Framework Prevents Superficial Analysis in Qualitative Research
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Abstract
Abstract: As quantitative methods dominate the field of clinical psychology, qualitative inquiry struggles to live up to its full potential. The ubiquitous quantitative criteria and epistemology lead to a flawed idea of objectivity, pursued by many qualitative researchers in an attempt to be taken seriously. Therefore, they try to avoid any possible theoretical influence. This often creates a fear for really interpreting data. However, it seems that instead of leading to higher quality research, this rather leads to superficial analyses. In this chapter, I show, based on my own recent research regarding the experience of negative symptoms in psychosis, how theory-use led to more in-depth analyses. Our study consisted of an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of interviews with twelve patients with psychosis about their negative symptoms. During the earlier phases of research, we stayed close to the data and tried to bracket our theoretical assumptions as much as possible. However, when coming to our final analysis, we approached the data more through a theoretical lens. This way we were able to lift our analysis from what was rather a summary of what our participants told to a deeper understanding of the process of negative symptoms.
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