Can you tell us about your research interests and specifically how qualitative inquiry became a main area of interest?
I have always been an avid reader and my love of stories led me to be interested in studying narrative analysis in graduate school. Once there, I came to be excited that, as a qualitative researcher, I could interview people who had unique insights and perspectives on many topics that fascinated me (i.e., psychotherapy, gender, LGBTQ issues). The prospect of being able to learn from others who had expertise in these areas and of having a lifetime of studying topics that I cared about led me to explore a career in academia, with a focus on qualitative methods.
How have your teaching practices evolved over the years?
My teaching tends to have an experiential component, and I enjoy organizing my qualitative method classes using a structure in which my students and I function as a research team. Through the semester, we engage in the stages of a qualitative research project, including conceptualizing a question, designing an interview protocol, learning to conduct interviews, analyzing data, and developing a draft of a qualitative manuscript. The class typically continues on to develop a publication, with all students as coauthors, and so we take the process of learning and analysis seriously and are invested in the project. I have written about this approach to teaching because I have found that it makes teaching fun for both the students and myself (Levitt, Ippolito & Kannan, 2013).
Can you describe a few central accomplishments from your career as a qualitative and mixed methods researcher?
I have had the pleasure of leading two task forces that have been particularly important to me because they have developed ways of evaluating methods that present an alternate to the cookbook or checklist approaches and move the field towards a conceptually-driven understanding of rigor that supports a diversity of qualitative approaches. The first was a task force of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP; Section 3 of Div. 5), which developed recommendations for the design and review of qualitative methods (Levitt, Motulsky, Wertz, Morrow & Ponterotto, 2017). This paper formulated the framework of methodological integrity and presented principles that demonstrated its applications. The second was the task force that developed the first APA journal article reporting standards for qualitative, qualitative meta-analysis, and mixed methods (Levitt, Bamberg, Creswell, Frost, Josselson, & Suárez-Orozco, 2018). The latter article was the most frequently downloaded article across all APA journals in 2018 and is the basis for the standards in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition (APA, 2020).
In addition, being president of SQIP was a great honor for me. SQIP draws together qualitative and mixed methods psychologists from across a broad range of epistemological perspectives, methods, and content areas, and advocates for the inclusion of these varied approaches in psychology. It is an important voice of advocacy for methodological pluralism in our field and has led to the development of the journal, Qualitative Psychology. Under my leadership during 2017-2018, we grew both the student and international committees, developed a database of graduate qualitative programs, planned a Distinguished Research Webinar Series, and held a successful conference at Duquesne University that provided opportunities for dialogue and connection for qualitative researchers internationally. It has been a joy for me to work with this group of talented and creative set of researchers and scholars.
Looking ahead, what inspires you and what challenges do you foresee for qualitative inquiry?
As qualitative methods have increased in their use and impact, many journal editors are working to consider how to best support the incorporation of rigorous qualitative methods in their journals. Challenges that they face include finding associate or consulting editors who have the expertise to oversee the review of these papers, and accommodating the extra length that is required for a typical qualitative paper to be presented with the details necessary for an adequate review. Some suggestions for how to approach these challenges have been advanced in the SQIP task force paper and many journals are incorporating reviewing processes that support epistemological and method-related pluralism. A second challenge has been to recognize the ethical problems that requiring data sharing poses for many qualitative research projects (see the section on problems of data sharing for qualitative methods in APA, 2020). Increasingly, the field is expecting that the unique processes involved in qualitative methods are recognized, rather than attempt to force these methods to conform to an ethics or evaluative logic that does not recognize their form or suit their processes. I see the continued growth of interest in qualitative research in the field as exciting, however, and I am inspired by the work produced by qualitative and mixed methods researchers, thriving across many professional societies, philosophical approaches, and geographic borders. This work is reaching across so many forms of identities, histories, and methods to disintegrate boundaries that previously disrupted conversations across lines and is generating novel alliances and new depths of mutual understanding.
References
American Psychological Association (2020). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th Edition), Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Levitt, H. M., Bamberg, M., Creswell, J. W., Frost, D., Josselson, R., & Suárez-Orozco, C. (2018). Journal article reporting standards for qualitative research in psychology: The APA Publications and Communications Board Task Force report. American Psychologist, 73(1), 26-46. doi: 10.1037/amp0000151
Levitt, H. M., Ippolito, M. R., Kannan, D. (2013). Teaching qualitative methods using a research team approach: Publishing grounded theory projects with your class. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 10, 119-139. DOI: 10.1080/14780887.2011.586101.
Levitt, H. M., Motulsky, S. L., Wertz, F. J., & Morrow, S. L., Ponterotto, J. G. (2017). Recommendations for designing and reviewing qualitative research in psychology: Promoting methodological integrity. Qualitative Psychology, 4, 1-22. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/qua-qup0000082.pdfopens in new window