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BACKGROUNDThis methodological essay discusses the following question: How can researchers’ competences in exploring existential aspects related to healthcare be enhanced? Exploring this novel perspective on caring practice may help us better understand and communicate about experiences and issues that matter to others (e.g., patients/users). Two things are needed; firstly, a vocabulary mirroring an “aesthetic-holistic” research approach allowing us to capture the essence of “what it is like”; secondly, development of skills and competences allowing us to understand complex aspects of caring that are embodied, ethically sensitive and sustainable. AIMTo identify personal competences and approaches underpinning research exploring ‘what it is like’ - understanding human existence. DISCUSSIONThe discussion addresses three questions: A) What does human science exploring human existence search for? B) Which researcher competences are required? C) Which theoretical and practical approaches and dimensions may enhance the researchers’ competences? We argue that we should find ‘ourselves’ not only grasped through language and a qualitative research-methodological approach, but also in what is reflected in the relation between self, language (dialogue) and the other. It is crucial to listen to the world in an ontological way. Emotions, feelings and bodily sensed understandings can, in some situations, bar us from stepping further into meta-physical listening and from adopting a being-in-the-world stance. In this relational perspective, the researcher may adopt an attentive pace and aesthetical attunement that transcend what cannot be reached through the language of logical, rigorous, precise and rational words, tuning into the ontological mood that exist as the tacit backdrop of our existence. This approach we dub “Embodied Relational Research”.CONCLUSIONResearchers who explore humanity may benefit from cultivating awareness, sensitivity and understanding while displaying openness towards the other (the patients’ or users’ experiences). In this context, contemplative and creative dimensions are important to apply. Background: This methodological essay discusses the following question: How can researchers' competences in exploring existential aspects related to healthcare be enhanced? Exploring this novel perspective on caring practice may help us better understand and communicate about experiences and issues that matter to others (e.g. patients/users). Two things are needed: firstly, a vocabulary mirroring an “aesthetic-holistic” research approach allowing us to capture the essence of “what it is like” and secondly, the development of skills and competences allowing us to understand complex aspects of caring that are embodied, ethically sensitive and sustainable. Aim: To identify personal competences and approaches underpinning research exploring “what it is like”—understanding human existence. Discussion: The discussion addresses three questions: (A) What does human science exploring human existence search for? (B) Which researcher competences are required? (C) Which theoretical and practical approaches and dimensions may enhance the researchers' competences? We argue that we should find “ourselves” not only grasped through language and a qualitative research-methodological approach but also in what is reflected in the relation between self, language (dialogue) and the other. It is crucial to listen to the world in an ontological way. Emotions, feelings and bodily sensed understandings can, in some situations, bar us from stepping further into meta-physical listening and from adopting a being-in-the-world stance. In this relational perspective, the researcher may adopt an attentive pace and aesthetical attunement that transcend what cannot be reached through the language of logical, rigorous, precise and rational words, tuning into the ontological mood that exists as the tacit backdrop of our existence. This approach we dub “Embodied Relational Research.”. Conclusion: Researchers who explore humanity may benefit from cultivating awareness, sensitivity and understanding while displaying openness towards the other (the patients' or users' experiences). In this context, contemplative and creative dimensions are important to apply.

Hannah Arendt’s unfinished masterpiece The Life of the Mind contains an analysis and spirited defense of thinking, which is more relevant than ever. Thinking, for Arendt, is not simply a cognitive process of problem solving, but is an existential process of meaning making. Unlike cognitions, which are instrumental, Arendt argues that thinking is an activity that is performed for its own sake. In this paper, I follow both Arendt and her teacher, Martin Heidegger, and ask, first, why non-instrumental thinking has become difficult in today’s world. There is a strong cultural critique in Arendt’s perspective on the inherent value of thinking, directed at a society in which almost everything is judged in terms of instrumental performativity. Second, I unfold what I call Arendt’s view of the moral landscape to which thinking is connected, before I conclude by discussing ways in which spaces for thinking in Arendt’s sense can be created in schools, making a form of Bildung possible for human beings.

Chapter 1 gives an overview of the variegated landscape of qualitative interviewing. Qualitative interviewing has today become a key method in the human and social sciences and many other corners of the scientific landscape, such as education and the health sciences. After recounting the history of interviewing in the human and social sciences, the chapter summarizes the central epistemological and theoretical positions on interviewing. Particular attention is given to the complementary positions of experience-focused interviewing (phenomenological positions) and language-focused interviewing (discourse-oriented positions), which focus respectively on interview talk as reports (of the experiences of interviewees) and accounts (occasioned by the situation of interviewing).

Chapter 2 on research design maintains a focus on the two main positions and describes certain well-tested ways of designing interview studies. Research using qualitative interviewing does not happen by chance but is designed by researchers. What sets research interviews apart from everyday conversations is the much greater extent to which they are planned and reflected on in advance—and subsequently analyzed. Four common steps in a research process are described: preparation, interviewing, analysis, and reporting. It is argued that different design questions arise from different interests in knowledge production, and interviews can be used in particular for purposes of discovery, construction, and understanding aspects of our social and personal worlds.

A common problem in qualitative interviewing concerns how to reduce or condense the often large amounts of data in interview studies. Chapter 5, on writing up the research findings, uses this problem as a springboard for describing more generally how to report research findings in ways that are both compelling and rigorous. The chapter refers to examples of findings that are based on theoretical readings of qualitative data and also discusses ways of presenting findings that are much freer from social science theory. There are numerous ways of writing up the findings, among them ways that make use of inductive, deductive, and abductive strategies, which are all discussed. The chapter also advocates the use of displays, which are graphic presentations of large amounts of data in ways that include what is central and makes transparent what has been left out.

Chapter 3 focuses on the interview phase itself. Different styles and forms of interviewing are discussed in this chapter as they are each appropriate for different purposes. Key distinctions are introduced between receptive and assertive interviewer styles, which are somewhat aligned with experience-focused and discourse-oriented approaches, respectively, and between doxastic and epistemic forms of interviewing. Doxastic interviewers seek to capture the experiences and opinions (the doxa) of the interviewees, whereas epistemic interviewers can be more confronting, with the ambition of developing epistemic knowledge in the interview situation itself (e.g., with inspiration from Socratic conversations). The chapter also presents different ways of analyzing interviews. It closes with a reflection on the ethics of interviewing and addresses some of the ethical dangers that are not often thought of in the context of qualitative interviewing.

Qualitative interviewing has today become one of the most common research methods across the human and social sciences, if not the most prevalent approach, but it is an approach that comes in a huge amount of different guises. Qualitative Interviewing will help its readers conduct, write, represent, understand, and critique qualitative interview research in its many forms as currently practiced. This book does not simply tell its reader how to employ a method, but educates by showing and discussing excellent exemplars of qualitative interview research. The book begins with a theoretically informed introduction to qualitative interviewing by presenting a variegated landscape of how conversations have been used for knowledge producing purposes. Particular attention is given to the complementary positions of experience focused interviewing (phenomenological positions) and language-focused interviewing (discourse-oriented positions), which focus on interview talk as reports (of the experiences of interviewees) and accounts (occasioned by the situation of interviewing), respectively. The following chapters address different ways of designing and conducting qualitative interview studies and how to write up the methodological procedures of an interview study and also the research findings. The book finally discusses a number of the most common errors in interview reports and offers a range of solutions and also strategies for evaluating research findings based on qualitative interviews.

Zagaria, Andò and Zennaro have provided a useful analysis of the theoretical precariousness of psychology by looking at a number of its core concepts. They propose that evolutionary psychology could be a unifying approach for the otherwise fragmented discipline. In this response, I argue that although evolutionary psychology provides many interesting perspectives on the mental life of human beings, it is much too soon to jump to a unifying conclusion for psychology on its basis. Before beginning the work of explaining the functioning of the mind in evolutionary terms, we need illuminating descriptions of mental life as such. Phenomenological description should precede evolutionary explanation, and the former will reveal that mental life is intentional and normative – something that evolutionary and other explanatory perspectives have difficulties accommodating. When the subject matter is human mental life, it might be better to live with conceptual confusion than obtaining consensus on a misguided foundation. I agree with the authors that psychology stands on feet of clay, but instead of lamenting the “unsteady building” of the discipline, I suggest we embrace a more nomadic life for psychology – moving about on our feet – given the fact that humans perpetually and historically seem to reflect on their own lives, which is a process that should be kept open rather than terminated.

BACKGROUND: An increasing body of qualitative and quantitative research suggests that choir singing can improve mental and physical health and wellbeing. A recurring phenomenon is social agency and social and emotional competences. However, there is little consensus about the underlying impact mechanisms and the special nature of music as a medium for music-based social-emotional competence.AIM: This research was carried out to explore how the participants experienced engaging and singing in the choir A Song for the Mind in order to understand the social and emotional aspects in relation to choir singing and mental health.METHOD: Six women and two men were interviewed. The study involved open-ended interviews and applied Paul Ricoeur's phenomenological-hermeneutic theory of interpretation in processing the collected data.FINDINGS: Two themes emerged-The Singing Me and Cultivating Us. Joining the choir, singing and engaging with the lyrics, helped the participants get in contact with complex feelings and visualise and express challenges. This formed feelings of connecting to oneself and opening up to become aware of the world such as nature, the other person and the choir. Songs, melodies, tones, lyrics-singing together-formed a relation between the participants and the other and the group. This was a meaningful, and to some, a life-changing experience, and an important learning process to the professionals. As the participants are sensing and connecting to themselves, there is an opening for growing a nascent presence and awareness.CONCLUSION: Joining the initiative A Song for the Mind instils an attention to the other person(s). The singing process seems to evoke presence, leading to awareness towards relational aspects and solidarity. In a choir singing perspective, and health care practice in general, this can be seen as a budding and ground-breaking formation of cultural activities holding learning and empowering potentials instilling mental health.

A few years ago, I received a long, handwritten letter from a woman who had read some of my books. I did not know her, but the woman mentioned in the letter that she was 90 years old, and she wanted to correct me on a few points. Most importantly, I had complained in a book that the discipline of psychology in which I work has not given sufficient attention to the idea of human dignity. The woman informed me that she had been in psychoanalysis for 33 years in order to achieve human dignity, and her analyst had based his practice on this very idea. So how could I, as a professor of psychology, say that this notion was missing from psychology, when it clearly had a life in practice? Now, three years after I received this letter, I have published a book about this woman’s life, reflecting among other things on the role of dignity in our lives. This article tells the story of how a letter from a reader initiated a relationship that resulted in a published book, as I was summoned as a researcher.

In this article, we support the use of poetic representations to study experiential and existential meaning-making. We do so by presenting five spoken-word poems, which we created out of the transcriptions of 14 in-depth interviews with Norwegian older adults, prior to their enrollment in a biographical writing course. The poetic representations which have been named by themes from the transcript are (a) Where love takes us, (b) Relax during catastrophes, (c) Learning to see humankind as one common humanity, (d) Listen inward, (e) Life is, indeed, too short. Each poetic representation condenses diverse meanings and perspectives about life. They also maintain the anonymity of participants, as the plurality of their voices becomes one within the stanzas. While presenting this creative form of qualitative inquiry and providing some methodological reflections, we also discuss the implications of this approach for the theoretical development of the notions of personal life philosophies and existential pathways in cultural psychology.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Jaan Valsiner’s contributions to developmental science and cultural psychology. In this brief analysis, I shall argue that Jaan Valsiner’s life and work fits nicely with a tradition of Bildung, which originates with the ancient Greeks and leads up to German philosophers of Bildung. Herder defined Bildung as “rising up to humanity through culture,” and culture in a normative sense would thus be those semiotic and material resources that enable such rising up, leading to the kind of free thinking that Jaan Valsiner’s work exemplifies.

Sociocultural psychology is now a firmly established approach to human meaning making ( Bruner, 1990 ) and meaning construction ( Valsiner, 2014 ). Its proponents rightly see culture not as a causal power but as a set of resources used by human agents ( Gillespie & Zittoun, 2010 ). However, I argue in this article that this approach needs to be balanced by the phenomenological insight from Heidegger and others that meaning is not always “made” but can also be “found.” Following Rosa (2019) , I argue that we should be careful not to reduce our relationship to the world to one of active agents that use passive resources as this easily mirrors the experiences of alienation in modernity. Humans display not only agency but also what I will call “patiency” in letting the world speak or resonate as we relate to it as more than a set of resources.

Jenny Mercer, one of the conference chairs, takes a look ahead to our forthcoming conference

In the sociology of the emotions, it has been common to approach emotions as socially constructed. Researchers have rightly asked how society and social processes shape emotional life, and this approach has generated many valuable insights. In this article, I argue that we should also approach the relation between emotions and society from a complementary perspective and ask how society itself is constituted through specific emotional processes. Social researchers of existential leanings have argued along these lines, pointing out how the human fear of death is crucial for the constitution of society. I argue that an equally fundamental emotion for the constitution of society is grief. I take up Tony Walter’s claim that grief underlies the very constitution of society and seek to develop it into a broader understanding of how human social life presuppose practices of grief and mourning, which enable collectives to move into the future on the basis of their past. I end with a brief discussion of how the current pathologization of grief may impact societal processes and our views of human beings.

The authors involved in the creation of this text collaborate on a research project called The Culture of Grief, which explores the current conditions and implications of grief. The authors mostly employ conventional forms of qualitative inquiry, but the present text represents an attempt to reach a level of understanding not easily obtained through conventional methods. The group of authors participated as members of the audience in an avant-garde theatrical performance about grief, created by a group called CoreAct. The artists of CoreAct create their art through systematic research, in this case on grief, and we as researchers decided to study both the development of the play and its performance, and to report our impressions in fragments in a way that hopefully represents the nature of grief as an experienced phenomenon. We use Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s concept of presence to look for understanding beyond meaning in grief and its theatrical enactment.

Much theorizing in psychology and related disciplines begins with a given model of the mind that is then applied in research projects to study concrete phenomena. Sometimes psychological research can be theory-driven in quite an explicit way, approaching the logic of the hypothetico-deductive method. Others reject this and prefer to work inductively, and, in the extreme case of positivism, perhaps try to avoid theorizing altogether. In this article I shall suggest another way to think of the relationship between psychological theories and psychological phenomena. My suggestion is not simply to replace the hypothetico-deductive model with an inductive one, but to argue that the most direct route to theories of the human mind that grasp its complexity is to begin with the Kantian question of transcendental philosophy: X exists – how is X possible? In the context of this article, I apply this questioning to the phenomenon of grief: Grief exists – what general psychological theory of the mind do we need in order to account for its possibility? I attempt to extract three general psychological points from the existence of grief, viz. (1) the deep relationality of the self, (2) the limitations of evolutionary accounts, and (3) the normativity of psychological phenomena. I shall argue that these are general psychological lessons to be learned from grief, although they could also be arrived at by considering several other significant psychological phenomena.

In recent years, human scientists have generalized the so-called hypothesis of the extended mind to human emotional life. The extended mind hypothesis states that objects within the environment function as a part of the mind and are centrally involved in cognition. Some emotion researchers have argued along these lines that there are bodily extended emotions, and (more controversially) environmentally extended emotions. In this article, we will first briefly introduce the idea of the extended mind and extended emotions before applying it to the emotion of grief specifically. We explain by introducing the notion of a cultural affective niche within which grief is scaffolded and enacted. An affective niche couples the person and the environment and enables the realization of affective states.

Writers devote their lives to find words that faithfully resemble what is at the core of human experience and existence. Thus, psychologists interested in understanding human development in everyday life could turn toward writers and poets with humble curiosity. In this article, we illustrate how a narrative analysis of a work of art can be done, taking “ The Art of Being Fragile. How Leopardi can Save your Life” by the Italian writer and teacher Alessandro D’Avenia as a case. In addition, we reflect upon the mastery with which the author sheds light on aspects that theories in cultural psychology have tried to unveil. Such aspects are: (a) poetic activism: a revolution of the poetics of everyday life; (b) the poetics of human development; (c) the beauty within the fragile as a master; and (d) the intuition of the spirit as an invitation.

Qualitative research does not represent a monolithic, agreed-on approach to research but is a vibrant and contested field with many contradictions and different perspectives. To respect the multivoicedness of qualitative research, this chapter will approach its history in the plural—as a variety of histories. The chapter will work polyvocally and focus on six histories of qualitative research, which are sometimes overlapping, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes even incommensurable. They can be considered articulations of different discourses about the history of the field, which compete for researchers’ attention. The six histories are: (a) the conceptual history of qualitative research, (b) the internal history of qualitative research, (c) the marginalizing history of qualitative research, (d) the repressed history of qualitative research, (e) the social history of qualitative research, and (f) the technological history of qualitative research.

This chapter gives an introduction to qualitative interviewing in its unstructured and semistructured forms. Initially, the human world is depicted as a conversational reality in which interviewing takes a central position as a research method. Interviewing is presented as a social practice that has a cultural history and that appears in a variety of formats in the 21st century. A number of distinctions are introduced, which are relevant when mapping the field of qualitative interviewing between different levels of structure, numbers of participants, media of interviewing, and interviewer styles. A more detailed exposition of semistructured lifeworld interviewing is offered because this is arguably the standard form of qualitative interviewing today.

Qualitative interview styles have been guided by precedent within academic disciplines. The nature of information sought, and the role of interviewer and interviewee are key determinants across styles, which range from doxastic (focused on understanding interviewees’ experiences or behaviors) to epistemic (focused on co-constructing knowledge). In this article, we position common interview styles along a doxastic–epistemic continuum, and according to the role of the interviewee (from respondent to equal partner). Through our typology and critique of interview styles, we enhance epistemic interviewing by introducing “deliberative interviews,” which are more debate oriented and closer to equality in the interviewee and interviewer relationship than existing interview styles. Deliberative interviews require a comprehensive, pre-interview briefing on the subject matter followed by interactive deliberation wherein complex issues are debated across viewpoints in an effort to devise solutions. The effectiveness of this interview style in generating new knowledge warrants empirical testing across academic disciplines.

William James famously defined psychology as the science of mental life. Much ink has since been spilled over the concept of the mental, but less so over the notion of life. In this article, I argue that psychologists should address life as an equally important concept. First, I briefly articulate Aristotle’s idea of the soul (or mind) as a life principle. Second, I argue with reference to Wittgenstein that the division between the living and non-living is more basic and important than that between mind and matter. Third, I introduce the work of the philosopher Hans Jonas, who made the phenomenon of life central to his existential interpretation of biological facts and argued that nature should be seen as a source of value. My conclusion is that psychology as a science of life must be a biographical science—a science of what it is to live a life.

This volume draws together the work of a diverse range of thinkers and researchers to address the question of happiness critically, using a wide variety of theoretical and empirical methodologies. Broadening the discussion beyond what might be considered highly individual and insular conceptualizations of happiness, often based on purely positivist approaches to the subject, authors raise questions about the nature of individual and collective anxieties that might underpin the current emphasis on happiness and the ideological or governmental ends that may be served by the framing of happiness in psychology and economics. With attention to how individuals understand and pursue happiness in their daily lives, Critical Happiness Studies highlights different theoretical paradigms that demonstrate the role of power in producing specific conceptualizations of happiness and, consequently, how they frame individual self-understanding or subjectivities and (re)shape political problems. The collection makes available critical, theoretical, and methodological resources for addressing a powerful set of cultural, political, and scientific discourses that have loomed large since the closing decade of the 20th century. A call for the establishment of a body of work in critical happiness studies, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities interested in the age-old problem of happiness.

The introduction to this collection offers an outline of the actors, institutions and processes that have contributed to the increasingly pervasive sense that we ought to be happy. We ask, Why happiness? Why now? We invite researchers to take the problem of happiness seriously. It is a matter of great – yet ordinary – human concern. We contextualise contemporary claims by examining historical precursors to the happiness turn. It traces the current preoccupation with happiness to the development of therapeutic and self-help culture and raise questions about the instrumental and political nature of individualised framings of emotions. We also note the dangers and risks inherent in these processes. A critical happiness studies, we argue, demands that researchers interrogate the ways in which happiness is presented as a socially and political supported possibility that is individually pursuable and simultaneously, a demand and necessity. It is important, however, that critical work considers the role that happiness plays in human lives. It is in this spirit that the essay calls for the establishment of a critical happiness studies. This should not be understood as a call to arms, but rather an invitation to critique and to contribute to more caring and collective conceptualisations of happiness.

Qualitative interviews are normally conducted as personal conversations between two or more individuals. Such personal conversations, however, are frequently used in the service of public scholarship, which gives rise to a number of significant issues having to do with researching private lives and placing accounts in the public arena. This chapter addresses the role of qualitative interviewing in public scholarship. It first discusses the very idea of the public, especially as it was articulated by the American pragmatist John Dewey. It is argued that the social sciences, and qualitative interviewing specifically, have a central role to play in the constitution of a public in modern society. The reader is then taken through various stages of interview research and some examples are given that show how qualitative interview studies have significantly advanced public scholarship.