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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).

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.

For more than 15 years, I have been an active qualitative researcher, working in particular with semistructured qualitative interviews, both in empirical research projects and as an author of textbooks on interviewing. In this state of the method article, I first articulate an approach to qualitative inquiry based on the fundamental idea of the conversation on ontological, epistemological, and methodological grounds. I then diverge a bit from standard methodological approaches to qualitative research and introduce the notion of gifts of chance: As conversational creatures, we sometimes stumble upon interesting and thought-provoking conversations that we may analyze in a knowledge-producing process, even if this process has not been carefully planned and designed. As an example, I refer to an ongoing research project I now conduct with a woman in her 90s, which began when she contacted me unexpectedly as a veritable gift of chance.

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.

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.

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.

The contrast between the call to stay human and the arguments in favor of posthumanism was striking. The philosophical and methodological reflections from the author's office readings seemed rather disconnected from the human tragedies among refugees and immigrants. Hans Jonas’ philosophy does not solve the refugee crisis or any other crises affecting the planet, but gives some conceptual resources that allow to remain humanists and use this vocabulary against xenophobic politicians, for example, in a way that at the same time preserves the insights of the new materialist thinkers. Building on posthuman and new materialist philosophies of thinkers such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Gilles Deleuze among many others, there is an increasingly prevalent post-qualitative critique of what the “post” scholars summarize as “conventional qualitative research”. The critique amounts to a political, ethical, ontological and methodological questioning of the assumptions and practices of humanistic qualitative inquiry as normally practiced.

I will here discuss the unique combination of empirical psychological research and normative moral philosophy found in the works of Rom Harre. I will argue that positioning theory—and its approach to rights and duties in human social life—is not yet another value neutral psychological theory, but rather rests on the idea that humans are dependent, rational animals (to use Alasdair MacIntyre’s phrase), which has a number of normative implications. It can even be argued that for positioning theory to work, one has to admit the existence of objective moral values as conditions for social life and communication as we know them (cf. the work of Anthony Holiday). Finally, I suggest that Harre’s socio-normative approach to rights and duties may need to be supplemented with insights found in the moral phenomenologies of Logstrup and Levinas, who stress the vulnerability of human beings as a ground of ethics and responsibility to the other.

Disputes about the origins of psychology in the history of the discipline are functional not for our understanding of the past, but as normative signs that regulate the construction of ideas in the future. We introduce the notion of open-ended normativity that regulates the development of a given discipline towards its future. Hence the question of the cultural origins of psychology becomes contested in the 21st century as an important topic. It proves that the history of psychology is an active participant in the making of psychology, as it is creating its future.

In this chapter, the authors focus on the methodological implications of imagination in scientific practice and move in two directions at the same time: they outline the methodological implications of using imagination as a research tool, and they address ways in which imagination can be studied in the human and social sciences. These are not unrelated because it might demand particular kinds of imagination to study imagination. The authors underline the importance of “stumbling data” as a kind of “food for thought” for the researcher. To stumble (metaphorically) is a condition for finding out new things about the social world. In the final part of the chapter, the authors suggest that researchers interested in using their own imagination as a research tool should, first, see themselves as farmers, metaphorically speaking, utilizing breaks and instances of stumbling, and, second, decide on heuristics and see mess as a gift.

Famously, Ebbinghaus declared that psychology has a long past, but only a short history. Psychology, as something implicit to human conduct, is as old as the human race, but the science, as an explicit investigative reflection upon that conduct, is a recent invention. Within the short history of psychology, we find an even shorter history of qualitative psychology specifically. Although most founding fathers (Freud, Piaget, Bartlett etc.) worked as “qualitative psychologists”, they found no need to thematize their methods of inquiry in this manner. Since around 1980, however, a field has established itself that can be called qualitative psychology. In this paper, I discuss how this field can move sensibly into the future, and I highlight two perils and two potentials. The perils stem from neo-positivism and a threatening “McDonaldization” of qualitative research, while the potentials are related to proliferation of new forms of inquiry and a transcending of disciplinary boundaries.

Almost 25 years ago, psychologist and qualitative methodologist Steinar Kvale conjectured that psychology might become obsolete or redundant in a postmodern age due to the modernist legacies of this science. This, of course, has not materialized, but the question of redundancy reemerges today in new philosophical guises related to the rise of posthumanist philosophy and what has come to be known as postqualitative research. In this article, I aim to (1) introduce the posthuman and postqualitative critique of conventional qualitative research with an eye to its relevance for psychology, (2) introduce a distinction between ontological and advocacy issues concerning the post qualitative critique in order to (3) propose the idea that qualitative psychologists can accept much of the ontological theorizing developed by posthuman and postqualitative scholars, and yet advocate a humanist agenda for both scientific and ethical reasons. Historically, this was attempted by pragmatists such as James and Dewey...

This article examines the Norwegian and Danish versions of the reality television series Paradise Hotel. The reality show emulates what postmodern consumer society wants us to believe in: a kind of “second transgression” for the human being, in which she is both free and without anxiety. The guests (predominantly male in line with prevailing gender norms) at Paradise Hotel may qualify as shameless—after spells of physical and psychological revelations in front of the camera with no visible regrets—still, the price is perhaps the loss rather than the gain of freedom. The medialized shameless self demands the subordination to narrow bodily and emotional standards during filming, which postpones most of the guests’ shame and regrets until after the cameras are turned off. This particular Fall may have unwanted personal consequences that lead to a spiral ascent crueler than Adam and Eve ever underwent.

From a hermeneutic viewpoint, human beings are self-interpreting creatures.History involves a development of the interpretive resources that humans have available for understanding themselves. Building on Charles Taylor’s interpretive approach to human subjectivity, this article attempts to outline some significant changes in such interpretive resources. It is argued that different forms of subjectivity go hand in hand with changing modes of self-interpretation: From a premodern notion of character, through a modern notion of personality, to a postmodernidea of identity. In a culture of character, people primarily interpret themselves according to a moral and religious perspective; in a culture of personality, a psychological (scientific as well as romantic) perspective becomes prominent, stressing individual personality and its development; and, in a contemporary cultureof identity, more fluid self-interpretations centred on a consumerist perspective gain in importance.

The hermeneutic tradition in psychology and the social sciences claims that we should understand human identity in terms of self-interpretation. This article is an attempt to spell out what it means to think of identity as self-interpretation. First, two dimensions of identity as self-interpretation are outlined: that we can only have an identity if we are committed to issues of moral worth; and that self-interpretation involves a temporal dimension that has a narrative form. Second, I outline four levels of self-interpretation in order to show that identity is not confined to either social or mental representations, but is dispersed across bodies, persons, practices, and society. Often there are discrepancies and conflicts between levels of self-interpretation, which can lead to social progress but also to social pathologies. Finally, I analyse some pathological aspects of a dominating Western self-interpretation in the current consumer society, which frames identity formation in terms of self-realization.

The qualitative research interview is arguably the most widespread method of inquiry across the human and social sciences today. In spite of its popularity, there is a significant lack of theoretical reflection concerning this qualitative method of inquiry. On the background of other scholars’ recent experiences with interviewing in different cultural settings, this article begins to develop a theoretical account of qualitative interviewing. First, intercultural interviews are considered as methodological breaching experiments that enable us to better understand the intricacies of a practice that is otherwise taken for granted. Next, I argue that this should lead to a denaturalization of the interview. Qualitative interviewing must be considered not simply as a neutral instrument, capable of representing a “natural” human relationship, but rather as a social practice with a history that provides a specific context for human interaction and knowledge production. Some significant elements of this context are finally spelled out.

The author argues that conventional humanist qualitative inquiry took up both paths Foucault identified logical positivism and structuralism as well as theories and practices that emerged from the interpretive and critical turns in the social sciences. Students who may have read deeply in those theories may well experience a disconnect between a theory's assumptions and those that structure conventional humanist qualitative inquiry. But that truth and that real are chimeras, fictions, and neither can ever be outside human being but can only ever be human being the contingent, chaotic, impoverished limit of our imaginations and practices. Subjectivity implies the ongoing construction of human being, human being in flux, in processat every moment being disciplined, regulated, normalized, produced and at the same time, resisting, shifting, changing, and producing. Qualitative researchers use the two face-to-face methods to go deep, to interview repeatedly in order to get closer and closer to the center, the core of participants' being.

This paper discusses two sub-themes emerging from Robert Innis’ article on philosophy and cultural psychology. First, the distinction between the two fields of inquiry is discussed, and it is argued that a traditional separation of a normative philosophy and a descriptive and explanatory psychology cannot hold, because of the inherent normativity of all things psychological, as argued among others by John Dewey. Second, Innis’ search for a normative frame for cultural psychology is continued by moving in two directions at the same time: One that locates the source of normativity in historically evolved social practices (following the work of Alasdair MacIntyre), and another that looks phenomenologically at the ethical demand arising from human interdependency (following the work of Emmanuel Lévinas and K. E. Løgstrup). Such a two-sided normative frame can possibly acknowledge both the historicity of human morality and the existence of certain universal moral values.

This paper argues that an emerging framework for studying social episodes known as ‘positioning theory’ is a rich tool for practical reasoning. After giving an outline of the Aristotelian conception of practical reason, recently developed by Alasdair MacIntyre, it is argued that positioning theory should be seen not as a detached, scientific theory, but rather as an important resource for learning to think and act in relation to practical and moral matters. I try to demonstrate a number of significant points of resemblance between MacIntyre's analysis of practical reason and Rom Harre's positioning theory. Following a pragmatist view of social theories, I suggest that positioning theory can be seen as explicating an understanding of social episodes that we need to acquire in order to learn to act as capable practical reasoners, but which quite often is left implicit in our everyday lives. Finally, I consider how positioning theory could be used to train the capacity for practical reasoning in moral education.

This article discusses what it means to be a good qualitative researcher. The aim is to deliberately blur the distinction between epistemic and ethical goodness by arguing that there is a close connection between being a good qualitative researcher in the epistemic and the ethical senses. First, the relation between researcher and researched is articulated as a power relation giving rise to certain ethical demands. Second, some similarities between the discourses on ethics and qualitative research are brought forth, and it is argued that many key capabilities that enable qualitative researchers to deal well with their subject matter are also moral virtues. Finally, the concepts of objectivity and validity in qualitative research are discussed as moral matters.

Recent work in the historiography of psychology has suggested that the discipline must be seen as involved in the constitution of its own subject matter. Two questions arise. First, what does this tell us about the subject matter of psychology? Second, how should we understand and investigate the processes through which such ‘making up people’ occurs? This article addresses these questions by arguing, first, that psychological categories refer to human rather than natural kinds. In contrast to natural kinds, human kinds can exert effects on themselves. Then two different approaches to the ‘looping effect of human kinds’ are sketched: a Foucauldian analytics of the techne of psychology, and a hermeneutic understanding of humans as self-interpreting beings. It is argued that Foucault’s perspective, while rich in its critical potentials, lacks an adequate understanding of those values and meanings which are a part of human practical life.

The idea that the human world contains moral properties, that is, moral values and goods, raises a fundamental challenge to the prevailing methodological paradigm in psychology, which is connected to a problematic metaphysical worldview that excludes values from the world. In contrast, this article conceptualizes the human world as a moral ecology; as a meaningful world with moral properties that present human beings with moral reasons for action. The concept of social practice is employed to understand the nature of moral ecology. Thinkers such as Aristotle, Heidegger and Dewey, who emphasize our practical dealings with the world as the basis of understanding, along with the perspectives on morality found in Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, help provide the framework of moral ecology. The article concludes by addressing key problems related to the nature of psychology, relativism and identification of moral properties and practices.

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 today appears in a variety of different formats. 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 also interviewer styles. A more detailed exposition of semistructured life world interviewing is offered because this is arguably the standard form of qualitative interviewing today.

This article presents the fundamental paradigmatic principles of evolutionary psychology, which are then subjected to criticism. It is argued that evolutionary psychology suffers from both a number...

This paper develops a theory of rights that operates on a middle ground between ethnocentric universalism and cultural relativism. It does so by arguing that rights are derived from basic human vulnerabilities, which are situated and contextual. It is argued that advancing human rights is a legitimate goal for the human and social sciences and that all such sciences need a qualitative understanding of situated rights and duties in order to understand their subject matters. It is also argued that the emerging neo-positivism in the social sciences, in particular psychology, is detrimental to producing knowledge about human rights and rights violations, and that this may seriously affect our capacities for self-understanding and moral action. A tentative way forward is sketched that involves the education of students in a way that will sensitize them to human rights and vulnerabilities.

Unlike his ideas about education and philosophy, John Dewey’s psychology has been largely neglected. This article begins the rediscovery of his transactional psychology by seeking a synthesizing reading of those of his works that pertain to psychology. The article first outlines his transactional approach and also his metapsychology, which conceived of psychology as involved in the constitution of its own subject matter. Then some central psychological concepts such as habit, thinking, self, mind, meaning, and consciousness are explained within the transactional framework, and some similarities are highlighted between Dewey’s psychology and ecological psychology. It is argued that Dewey’s psychology is still very relevant in the 21st century.

In the introductory Chapter, I argued that psychological modes of understanding are pervasive in today’s Western culture. Roger Smith concludes that modern society is a Psychological Society. In the twentieth century, “everyone learned to be a psychologist, everyone became her or his own psychologist, able and willing to describe life in psychological terms” (Smith, 1997:577). In this chapter we turn our attention to the roots of Psychological Society with a special focus on the effects of psychologization on our moral lives. How have we learned to think about morality in an age dominated by psychological modes of understanding? How is it even possible to think about morality from the perspective of a psychological worldview? In order to answer these questions, we need to know what “the psychological worldview” is, how it arose historically, and how this worldview relates to our conceptions of morality and normativity.

In recent years, there has been a literary turn in parts of the social sciences. Attention has been given to social science writings as literature. In this article, the author approaches the issue from the opposite direction by engaging with literature as qualitative social inquiry. He does so through a reading of the French novelist Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq’s style represents a form of “lyrical sociology,” depicting human experience in a consumer society. The author argues that we can learn as much from Houellebecq about contemporary human lives, experiences, and sufferings as we can from traditional forms of empirical qualitative research. He concludes with a more general proposal of how to think about fact and fiction in social science writings.

Psychologists have traditionally been reluctant to investigate not just the historical nature of their subject matter — humans as acting, thinking and feeling beings — but even more so the historical nature of their discipline, its theories and practices. In this article, I will try to take seriously the historical transformation in the West from industrial society to consumer society. After having introduced these socio-economic designations, I shall try to illustrate how the transformation relates to changes in significant societal practices with a particular attention to education and work. Since its inception, psychology has been deeply involved in the management of human beings in and through these practices, and considerable changes have taken place in the dominant psychologies with the change from industrial to consumer society. I interpret psychoanalysis and behaviourism as psychologies of industrial society, and humanistic psychology and the more recent wave of social constructionism as psychologies of consumer society. With shifting psychologies also come shifting life problems and pathologies, which I briefly address.

This article develops an existential-phenomenological critique of the social constructionist movement in psychology, taking its lead from what Kenneth Gergen calls “the most pressing question”: What happens to us when we begin to employ constructionist ideas in our lives? It is suggested that contemporary consumer societies already work according to the logic of social construction and that constructionism already has become many people’s philosophy. Some points of conversion between constructionism and consumerism are pointed out, including a shared focus on identity morphing, aesthetization of life, and a denial of life’s tragic dimensions. As an antidote to this “ethics of infinitude,” this article outlines an existential-phenomenological ethics that starts from certain basic facts of human existence, including human interdependency and mortality. It is argued that nonconstructed moral demands spring from these facts. Social constructionists too easily miss the fact that solidarity, compassion, and care are possible only for finite, vulnerable creatures.

In this article we question the “ethicism” that often permeates the discourse on qualitative research, that is, the implicit idea that qualitative research is ethically good in itself, or at least ethically superior to the uncaring quantitative approaches. In order to throw light on the ethics of qualitative interviews in contemporary consumer societywhat has also been called “the interview society”we draw on microethics as well as macroethics, that is, on the relationships within the interview situation, as well as the relations to society and culture at large. We argue that prevailing forms of warm, empathic interviews are ethically questionable, and, as an antidote, we propose various forms of actively confronting interviews. We argue that ethics is a real and inescapable domain of the human world, and we propose that “The real has to be described, not constructed or formed” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. xi). Therefore we relocate the focus away from the construction of our ethics, to the question ...

In the course of the 20th century, human beings began to understand themselves in light of psychological concepts and theories. Freud taught people that they possessed unconscious drives and educat...

The article presents an interpretation of certain aspects of John Dewey’s psychological works. The interpretation aims to show that Dewey’s framework speaks directly to certain problems that the discipline of psychology faces today. In particular the reflexive problem, the fact that psychology as an array of discursive practices has served to constitute forms of human subjectivity in Western cultures. Psychology has served to produce or transform its subject-matter. It is shown first that Dewey was aware of the reflexive problem, and found that it needed to be addressed. Next, three concepts of Dewey’s psychology are drawn in: subjectivity, habit and morality. Dewey is interpreted as articulating what we today would call a practice-orientated approach to psychology, in which moral and practical reasoning is seen as a dimension of all knowledge and action. Subjectivity is understood as a function emerging with complex interaction. Finally, a Deweyan approach to how psychology and other social sciences can cope with, and make positive use of, the reflexive problem, is outlined. By acknowledging their existence in the world they study, i.e. by becoming moral sciences that realize their moral and political implications, the social sciences can become problem-solving instruments that serve to help create a democratic public, a community as an actual social idea. It is pointed out that Dewey had an attractive view both of psychology – the subject-matter and of Psychology – the discipline and its practices – and ventured on the rare attempt at explicating how they are connected in what he called Great Societies, what we today would call post- or late-modernity, and how Psychology can help to constitute Great Communities in which human beings might flourish.