Considering a journey through pluralism...

PHaR member Kisane Prutton, @psyckis on Twitter, reflects on our most recent meeting:

24^th October 2019

In today’s PHaR group gathering, we explored pluralism in the context of qualitative research, centring our discussion on the paper: Dempsey, M., Foley, S., Frost, N., Murphy, R., Willis, N., Robinson, S., Dunn-Galvin, A., Veale, A., Linehan, C., Pantidi, N. & McCarthy, J. (2019). Am I lazy, a drama queen or depressed? A journey through a pluralistic approach to analysing accounts of depression. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 1-19 (Online). DOI: 10.1080/14780887.2019.1677833

Dempsey et al define the purpose of pluralism to ‘understand meanings in data by bringing different perspectives to it. These may be analytical, methodological or theoretical ….’ (Dempsey et al, 2019, p.2). Using a shared data set on depression, the article aimed to shed light on the authors’ respective methodological approaches: Narrative analysis (NA), discourse analysis (DA), Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) and thematic analysis (TA).

The paper prompted a rich discussion among the PHaR participants, all pretty much in agreement that such a paper provided a welcome insight into the relative approaches of the selected methods. We felt the significance of the work therefore needed to be acknowledged and the authors congratulated for pursuing and achieving a publication. Being analytical, we noted the array of methods and concluded that the selection was probably driven by the interests of the individual researchers, rather than a strong theoretical rationale. We also would have liked to have seen more detailed insights from the data and reflections from the researchers, in particular to illuminate the differences between FDA and DA; however, writing up qualitative work for publication is always challenged by limitations on space.

The article describes the authors as a ‘fledgling research cluster’ (Dempsey et al, 2019, p4); it must have been a lot of fun to experience, share and learn from such a collaboration.