Qualitative Research Approaches for Psychotherapy: Reflexivity, Methodology, and Criticality

Qualitative Research Approaches for Psychotherapy offers the reader a range of current qualitative research approaches congruent with the values and practices of psychotherapy itself: experience-based, reflective, contextualized, and critical.

This volume contains 14 compelling, challenging new essays from authors in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, writing from a range of theoretical and cultural perspectives. The book covers both established and emerging approaches to qualitative research in this field, beginning with case study, ending with postqualitative, and with hermeneutic, reflexive, psychosocial, Talanoa, queer, feminist, critical race theory, heuristic, grounded theory, authoethnographic, poetic and collaborative writing approaches in between. These chapters introduce and explore the complexity of the specific research approach, its assumptions, challenges, ethics, and potentials, including examples from the authors’ own research, therapeutic practice, and life. The book is not a ’how to’ guide to methods but, rather, a stimulus for psychotherapy researchers to think and feel their way differently into their research endeavours.

This book will be an invaluable resource to postgraduate students, practitioners and established researchers in psychotherapy who are undertaking (or considering) qualitative research for their projects. It will also appeal to course tutors and trainers looking for a volume around which to structure a qualitative research methods course.

Keith Tudor is Professor of Psychotherapy at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Aotearoa New Zealand, where he is also Co-Lead of the AUT Group for Research in the Psychological Therapies. He is the editor of Claude Steiner, Emotional Activist (2020), and the author of Conscience and Critic (2017), both published by Routledge.

Jonathan Wyatt is Professor of Qualitative Inquiry and a co-director of the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His book, Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing: Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry, published by Routledge, won the 2020 ICQI Book Award.