Ruthellen Josselson, PhD, is professor of clinical psychology at The Fielding Graduate University. She was formerly a professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a visiting professor at Harvard University School of Education and a visiting fellow at Cambridge University. She is a co-founder of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP) and editor of the APA journal, Qualitative Psychology. She received the Henry A. Murray Award and the Theodore R. Sarbin Award from the American Psychological Association and the Distinguished Contribution to Qualitative Research Award from Div. 5. Based on interviews she has conducted over 35 years, she has written three books exploring women’s identity longitudinally ("Finding Herself," "Revising Herself") and most recently, "Paths to Fulfillment: Women’s Search for Meaning and Identity." Many of her other books ("The Space Between Us," "Best Friends," "Playing Pygmalion") are based on interviews, and she has authored many journal articles and book chapters that explore the theory and practice of qualitative inquiry. Recently, she has authored "Interviewing for Qualitative Inquiry: A Relational Approach." She has conducted workshops on qualitative inquiry in France, Norway, Finland, Israel and England as well as in the U.S. She was a member of the APA Task Force that produced the “Journal Article Reporting Standards for Qualitative Research.”
In your own words, what is a methodologist?
I think of a methodologist as someone who thinks about or develops procedures to investigate particular research questions within a defined epistemology. The methodologist considers scientific approaches that produce knowledge. In psychology, this would mean knowledge about the human experience or social phenomena or the intersection between them.
How did you become a methodologist?
I was trained as a clinical psychologist and as a developmental psychologist at the University of Michigan during the late 1960s when psychodynamic approaches were in their heyday. Much of what I was learning was to listen very closely to what my patients were telling me and to deeply understand their life histories and their experiences in the world. All of this seemed to me to be at the heart of human experience yet disappeared in the experimental or hypothesis-testing research that I was reading in my other courses. At the time, I was also working as a statistical consultant - even writing a cluster analysis program (which didn’t exist before the days of SPSS) and revising a factor analysis program to change how axes were rotated — so I was exquisitely aware of the assumptions and mischief that often goes into statistical analysis. In other words, I was too close to statistical analysis to idealize it, and the kinds of studies that relied on statistics for understanding seemed to me to be far from the insights I considered most important.
I began to look around for methods that could rigorously and reliably capture the kinds of knowledge that I could gain from clinical work, not in terms of helping others through psychotherapy, but in terms of contributing to a more general understanding through research in non-clinical areas like developmental and social psychology. For my dissertation, I wanted to study identity formation in women, back in the late 1960s when new possibilities for women were budding, and I needed methods to investigate the experience of the young women who were finding themselves in that changing world. This study has become a lifelong project as I have followed these women for almost 50 years, and I see how my understanding and use of methods has evolved over this time.
Who or what has had the largest impact on your career as a methodologist?
I remember reading Robert White’s Lives in Progress as an undergrad and for many years that was a book I held onto as a model of a book I wished I could write someday. I was deeply affected by the biography-based approaches of Erik Erikson and his work became a model for how to think about life histories. At Michigan, I had very supportive professors, in particular my mentor, Joe Adelson, who encouraged me to adapt the ways I was interviewing in a clinical setting to investigating identity in women. He had also done a great deal of interview-based research on political identity in adolescence and I cut my teeth working on a set of his interviews for my first research project.
At the time, there was no “qualitative research” although there was some grudging acknowledgement of “case study” approaches — even though major theories in psychology had developed through the work of people like Freud, Piaget and Maslow, who had studied “cases.” As Gordon Allport noted in the early 1940s, despite the importance to democracy of studying individuals in their contexts, there were not yet systematic methods for analyzing documents of personal experience. So, I largely felt my way in the early years, refining the ways I interviewed people, analyzed the interviews, and wrote about the results. Later, Jerome Bruner laid the paradigmatic groundwork for narrative modes of knowing in psychology and was very supportive of my efforts to do systematic narrative research. The methodology of qualitative research, with its many methods and approaches, has largely developed during my career rather than being something I was taught. The work of such people as Carol Gilligan, Amia Lieblich, Michelle Fine, Dan McAdams, Ken Gergen and Mark Freeman in psychology, Ruth Behar, Barbara Myerhoff and especially Clifford Geertz in anthropology were models for me. I was also doing a lot of reading in philosophy, and the writings of Paul Ricoeur, Mikhail Bakhtin and Hans-Georg Gadamer helped me make the conceptual shift away from hypothetico-deductive logical positivistic epistemology to the interpretive science of hermeneutics. Donald Spence’s Narrative Truth and Historical Truth was mind-altering for me.
What is the most memorable thing that has happened to you as a methodologist?
Founding the Society of Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP) with Ken Gergen and Mark Freeman and then creating the journal Qualitative Psychology were significant in creating a formal space for qualitative research in psychology. In the process, we brought together many like-minded researchers who had been doing their work feeling isolated or marginalized and formed a community that could support and energize each other. We also had the wonderful opportunity to work collaboratively with people like Neil Schmidt, Gwen Boodoo, Irving Weiner and Todd Little, who supported us in joining SQIP to Div. 5. Getting the recognition of becoming the division of quantitative and qualitative research has realized my long-held dreams of legitimizing this research methodology — in psychology particularly. (Qualitative methods have for a long time been valued in other social sciences, for example, in education and in nursing.) I feel we in psychology are just beginning to reap the promises of qualitative research to enrich our discipline through inspiring new theory, fostering minority inclusion and finding ways to collaborate with quantitative researchers to contribute to addressing social problems. For me, the promise of qualitative inquiry is primarily methodological — and this whole movement has been memorable — and meaningful — to me.
More specifically, I was very moved at the last annual SQIP meeting to witness the variety of qualitative methods being used by the four generations of qualitative researchers who were presenting their work there. I was thrilled by the energy at this conference — people being innovative in finding ways to stay close to human experience and discover answers to important research questions. And the fact that there were four generations — members of the founding generation like me, the just-younger professors and associate professors, some of whom had made a late career shift to doing qualitative research, the assistant professors who were enthusiastic about what they could learn with these methods and perhaps most important, the many graduate students who understood in some ways that they will be carrying the flag forward and making these modes of investigation bear fruit and be increasingly taken seriously in psychology.
What advice would you give to a student who was thinking about applying to a methodology program?
I don’t think there exist many (if any) qualitative research methodology programs in psychology (for a partial list of graduate programs that have faculty and/or courses on qualitative methods, please look on the SQIP websiteopens in new window). For students who are interested in qualitative methodology, it would be important to apply somewhere where there are dedicated qualitative research courses, which would imply that there are faculty who are doing and thinking about qualitative methodology. I think that in the future there will be a need for experts in qualitative methodology and I hope more graduate programs create such learning opportunities for students. I also hope that undergraduate students will be introduced to qualitative methods in their introductory and research courses as well. Psychology has only recently opened to qualitative methodology, so we are in a transition phase of finding ways to educate our students in these approaches by representing qualitative research in the curriculum.