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The Rise of Qualitative Research in Psychology

DAVID L. RENNIE

KIMBERLYD. WATSON

ALTHEA M. MONTEIRO

York University

AbstractA study is presented on the rise of qualitative research inpsychology over the 20th century. The incidence of quali-tative research as indicated by several search terms (i.e.,"qualitative research," "grounded theory," "discourseanaly*," "empirical phenomenological," and "phenomeno-logical psychology") was traced through the PsycINFO andDissertation Abstracts International databases. It was foundthat, with the exception of the search terms having to dowith phenomenology, records containing these searchterms were basically non-existent until the 1980s, whenthere was a sharp rise that intensified in the 1990s. ThePsycINFO records were sorted according to (1) whetherthey came from psychology or other social and health sci-ence disciplines; (2) region of origin; (3) the types of doc-ument to which they referred; and (4) whether theyfocused on the methodology or the application of qualita-tive research. A number of interesting differencesemerged from this comparative analysis. Implications ofthe findings for the supposition that a paradigm shift maybe underway are discussed.

The term "qualitative research" refers to a variety ofapproaches to enquiry in the health and social sci-ences that address the meaning of verbal text in verbalrather than numerical terms. More fundamentally,qualitative research is more subjective than quantita-tive research; more exploratory than confirmatory;more descriptive than explanatory; more interpretivethan positivist (see Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). Thus, inmany ways qualitative research cuts across the grain ofaccustomed research practice. Accordingly, there isresistance to accepting it in many quarters.Nevertheless, a path has been cleared for it in part bythe postmodern critique of the modern quest forobjective knowledge. More fundamentally, perhaps,

Canadian Psychology/Psychologic canadienne, 43:3

the appeal of qualitative research is so great for someinvestigators that they are engaging in it despite theresistance to it (McMullen, 2002; Stoppard, 2002).

There seems to have been an uptake of qualitativeresearch in psychology in recent years. It also seemsthat no one has examined the extent of this uptake. Anumber of questions are of interest: When did theturn to qualitative research in psychology begin andhow has its growth developed? What kinds of publica-tions constitute the resulting literature? Are thereregional differences in the use of qualitative research?How much emphasis has been placed on qualitativeresearch methodology as opposed to its application?

It appeared to us that the answers to questions likethese would have a bearing on the most interestingquestion of all: What is to be made of the arrival ofqualitative research on the scene in terms of the pre-dominance of the natural science approach toenquiry? Is its presence now large enough that it canbe considered a major movement - the emergence ofan alternative "paradigm," as Kuhn (1970; cf.McMullen, 2002; O'Neill, 2002) might put it? Oralternatively, is it the case that, under close scrutiny, itbecomes evident that qualitative research has yet tomake a significant impact on the psychology researchinfrastructure?

In an attempt to address these questions, we decid-ed to study the psychological literature produced inthe 20th century. This decision presented a numberof difficulties having to do with changes in the use oflanguage over that period of time. This problemcould have been addressed through the study ofwhole documents. To do that would have necessitatedsampling in order to handle the volume of them, how-ever. The alternative was to apply search terms to anelectronic database. This approach had the appeal ofbeing more comprehensive. Even here, though, sucha study would be limited by the scope of the particulardatabase and by the particular search terms used.Thus, neither approach is ideal but, on balance, giventhat we wished to do an exploratory study, we decidedthat the latter strategy is the better of the two and soturned to PsycINFO, produced by the AmericanPsychological Association (APA).

After applying a number of search terms (seebelow) to PsycINFO, we eventually chose five termshaving to do with qualitative research. One was the

180 Rennie, Watson, and Monteiro

blanket term, "'qualitative research." The other fourterms pertained to particular methods and approach-es. The first was "grounded theory," referring to themethod developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967). Thesecond was phenomenological psychology represent-ed by the terms "phenomenological psychology" and"empirical phenomenology" (see, e.g., Fischer, 1998;Giorgi, 1970). Finally, "discourse analy*" was used tocover a number of approaches related to the analysisof discourse (see, e.g., Ibanez & Iniquez, 1997; Potter& Wetherell, 1987). Moreover, once using PsycINFO,our attention was drawn to its coverage of publicationscoming out of fields other than psychology. Hence,we traced the appearance of the terms in records com-ing out of these other fields to provide a rough com-parison between them and psychology. Finally, uponthe discovery that the database incompletelyaddressed dissertation abstracts, we applied the searchterms to a second database, Dissertation AbstractsInternational, to get a better sense of the uptake ofqualitative research by graduate students. We did notisolate psychology dissertations in this large search,however.

As will be seen, the study indicated that theincrease in publications entailing several of thesesearch terms has been dramatic in the last twodecades. It also revealed interesting variations in theuse of different approaches to qualitative research,among the disciplines and regions that we studied.

Method1. PsycINFOIn what follows, the term "record" refers to depictionin PsycINFO and Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI)of publications and dissertations. This depiction typi-cally consists of the item's title, author(s), affiliation ofthe first author (but see below), source, date of publi-cation/dissertation, abstract and major descriptors orkey words. In the case of PsycINFO, records contain-ing the search terms were scrutinized to determine ifthey in fact were pertinent to the search terms as weunderstood them. The records that survived thisweeding are referred to as "hits."

The searches were conducted with the "word any-where" option, which scanned across all fields in thedatabase. The initial search in PsycINFO included 16word phrases - "qualitative analysis," "qualitativeresearch," "grounded theory," "grounded analysis,""phenomenology," "empirical phenomenology,""empirical phenomenological," "phenomenologicalpsychology," "discourse analy*," "discursive psy-cholog*," "content analysis," "case study," "hermeneu-tic," "interpretive," "interpret and research," and"interpret* and analysis." (The use of the asterisk

picked up various suffixes of the stem term, thus"analy*" caught "analytic," "analytical," and "analy-sis.")

This approach had limitations. There were termswe did not use, such as "ethnograph*," "actionresearch," and "heuristic research." Also, there maybe disciplines such as anthropology that customarilyuse qualitative research methods of various sorts with-out putting any label on them because, for that disci-pline, the practice is taken for granted. Further, oneof the terms we considered - case study - yielded12,190 records where that term was used in a varietyof ways, only some of which seemed to relate to quali-tative research. It was our judgment that case studies,although around for a long time, have been consid-ered in mainstream psychology as a source of theorydevelopment requiring scientific investigation; theyhave not been granted research status in their ownright (see Kvale, 2001). Instead, it has been empiricalphenomenology and grounded theory methodolo-gists, especially, who have led the way in advocatingthat these methods are legitimate, alternative methodsof research in psychology. In our interpretation, thisassertion has been made on the ground that thesemethods allow for generalization, albeit of limitedscope. Thus, it has only been recently that users ofcase studies have made a concerted bid to have thismode of enquiry counted as a legitimate form ofresearch by integrating them into the qualitativeresearch family, as in narrative analysis (e.g., McLeod& Balamoutsou, 1996; Polkinghorne, 1995). It alsohappens that much of discourse analysis involves casestudies. The focus of this approach is often criticalrather than empirical, however. Still, there are manywho are engaged in this type of discourse analysis whobelieve that it is a form of qualitative research (seeReicher, 2000) and so, in using "discourse analy*" as asearch term, we decided to go with this tide. Onanother front, an effort is being made by declaredqualitative research methodologists to derive general-izations from case studies, as in ideal type analysis(e.g., Frommer & Langenbach, 2001; Stuhr &Wachholz, 2001). Overall, then, it was our judgmentthat the case study is being integrated into qualitativeresearch more than being considered formative of it.It was thus our opinion that the term "case study" isnot as important an indicator of qualitative researchas are the search terms we finally decided on, whichwere "qualitative research," "grounded theory,""empirical phenomenological," "phenomenologicalpsychology," and "discourse analy*."

The searches were conducted by decade, from1900 to 1999. We also obtained the total number ofrecords in PsycINFO per decade, so that we could com-

Rise of Qualitative Research in Psychology 181

pare the growth of records containing the searchterms to the growth of records as a whole. A total of3,262 records were produced by the search terms forthe period from 1900-1999 (see Table 3). We printedthese records and studied the abstracts therein, inteams of two and sometimes three, in decidingwhether or not to declare the record a hit. As will beseen, a residual of 2,467 hits resulted from this weed-ing (see Table 1).

Judgments of what constituted a hit. In conducting thesearch, we had to develop a working definition ofeach term. For "qualitative research," we includedany research that entailed an interpretive representa-tion of meanings emerging from analysis of text andwas expressed primarily in nonnumerical language.Thus, we excluded content analysis involving a prioricategories and/or the cursory use of qualitative data(i.e., verbal text) in quantitative studies. The use of"grounded theory" was governed by evidence that theterm applied to this method as a form of qualitativeresearch, as opposed to any other use of the term, asin, say, a theory that is grounded without any refer-ence to the method. The features of the method thatwe looked for were categorization as a form of repre-sentation of meaning of text; constant comparativeanalysis; theoretical memoing; and theoretical sam-pling. With regard to "empirical phenomenological,"we drew on Fischer's (1998) depiction of this methodas involving the conceptualization of structures ofexperience and conduct described in psychologicallanguage.

The other two terms were comparatively moreproblematic, especially "discourse analy*." We foundthat in PsycINFO this stem applied both to qualitativeand quantitative analysis of discourse. Moreover, anumber of records having to do with psychoanalysiswere called "discourse analysis" (e.g., when theanalysand's discourse was referred to in the record)when the record simply referred to discourse ratherthan depicting what appeared to be an actual analysisof it. We judged that this use of the term extended itbeyond the range of the broadest definition of"research," whether qualitative or quantitative. Thus,we found that we had to refer to the literature on dis-course analysis repeatedly in our development of aworking definition (the edited book by Ibanez &Iniguez, 1997, proved to be especially helpful) .According to this definition, qualitative discourseanalysis is the nonquantitative analysis of units of textlarger than a sentence where the emphasis is on thediscourse itself. It is not on the discourse as a repre-sentation of meaning interpreted to have been experi-enced by the author of the text, as is the focus in, say,

empirical phenomenology and the grounded theorymethod. Instead, it is directed more to the analysis ofpolitical, cultural, and social meanings evident in thetext irrespective of the inner experience of its author.Nevertheless, we included as a hit for "discourseanaly*" methods that strictly speaking were other thandiscourse analysis but which were labeled as discourseanalysis by the PsycINFO compilers - methods such asnarrative analysis, conversation analysis, eth-nomethodology, and pragmatics. (On the other sideof the coin, of course, because we did not search thelast four methods as such, we would have missed thosefor which "discourse analy*" was not mentioned in therecords.)

We also had difficulty with the term "phenomeno-logical psychology," finding many records that hadmore to do with the philosophy of mind than with psy-chology. It is possible that this development derivedfrom Husserl's (1977/1925) lectures on phenomeno-logical psychology. This work was Husserl's attempt todescend from philosophy to psychology and, goingwith it, from rationalism to empiricism, but this was ahalf-hearted attempt that had more to do with philos-ophy than with psychology despite his intention to dootherwise (see Scanlon's Introduction to the abovebook). Initially, we were inclined to exclude the for-mer type of records but eventually changed ourminds, on the ground that any application of themethod of phenomenological analysis, whether rationalor empirical, should count. By this we mean theattempt to bracket (i.e., suspend) predisposing con-ceptualizations of the phenomenon under study inthe interest of describing its structure. Other recordshad to do with existential-phenomenological psy-chotherapy theory, which we did exclude.

Procedurally, for each search term, either Monteiroor Watson did an initial examination of the recordspertaining to a given search term to determine its fit.Rennie then checked these judgments. In the case of"discourse analy*," the weeding and checking weredone twice. When weeding through the records, wenoticed that there was some overlap in search terms(e.g., a given record would contain references to both"grounded theory" and "qualitative research"). Toaccount for overlaps, an additional PsycINFO literaturesearch was conducted in which each two-way combina-tion of the five search terms was entered. The returnsof these searches were recorded. We decided againstgoing through the hits again to choose between com-peting terms when they overlapped, however, on theground that doing so would not appreciably alter theoverall picture (more on this in the Results section).

Classifying the hits. In a subsequent textual analysis, we


examined all hits and noted information on each one.We developed the following categories. Disciplinereferred to either Psychology or Other. Document Typemeant whether the hit was a Book, Chapter, Journal,or Dissertation. Region applied to North America (i.e.,Canada and the USA); the United Kingdom andIreland; Scandinavia (i.e., Finland, Sweden, Norwayand Denmark); Australia and New Zealand; Germaniccountries (i.e., Germany, Austria, and theNetherlands); South Africa; or Other. Focus referredto either Methodology or Application of a method.

In the case of chapters and books and editedbooks, the categorization of Discipline was based onthe first author's affiliation. This decision was notideal because, of course, it is possible for nonpsychol-ogists to be affiliated in a psychological setting and forpsychologists to be affiliated in nonpsychological set-tings. To complicate matters further, author affilia-tions are not listed consistently in PsycINFO. Whenauthor affiliations were not listed for books and chap-ters, we conducted a search of the author's name inPsycINFO, to see if the affiliation was listed in otherpublications. If this was not fruitful, then the secondauthor's or editor's affiliation was sought. Journal arti-cles were too numerous to allow for such a return tothe database each time the information was not pre-sent, so in this case the categorization of Disciplinewas based on the nature of the journal rather thanauthor affiliation. Again, this tactic was not idealbecause nonmembers of a discipline sometimes pub-lish in journals outside it. Most journals were easilycategorized but for some interdisciplinary journals ajudgment was required and we recognize that some ofour classifications of journals could be disputed. Allof this meant that our estimates of affiliations are onlyapproximate. Finally, for the purpose of analysis, thefields other than psychology were collapsed into"Other."

Dissertation records in PsycINFO did not includeauthors' affiliations so we relied on the disciplinecode. Specifically, we learned that all dissertations inPsycINFO were classified as "psychology." As a result,we conducted a supplemental literature search in theDissertation Abstracts International (DAf) database, thedetails of which are described below.

Author affiliation was also used to determine thehit's geographical Region. When it was impossible toclassify Region in this way, it was assigned to an"Other" category.

The decision about a hit's Document Type was usu-ally straightforward because it was based on whetherthe publication was a book, chapter, journal article, ordissertation. If all of an edited book was relevant tothe search term, then the hit was counted as a Book.

If only certain chapters from an edited book were rel-evant, then each of the relevant chapters was countedas a Chapter.

2. Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI)Because PsycINFO picks up dissertations coming out ofpsychology, only, we decided to conduct a supplemen-tary literature search in DAI to address qualitativeresearch activity evident in dissertations emergingfrom other disciplines as well. Again, a search wasconducted for each of the five search terms, by decadefrom 1900 to 1999. We noted the number of recordsfor each search term but we did not print records,weed through them, or collect data on them, giventhat they totalled to 7,146. We also obtained the totalnumber of records for each decade in DAI, to get anindication of the rise of search terms in this regardcompared to the rise in dissertation records taken as awhole. Finally, we did a search of the overlap amongsearch terms, limited to combinations of two terms.

ResultsOCCURRENCE OF THE SEARCH TERMS: 1900-1999PsycINFO. The data for the five search terms - "quali-tative research," "grounded theory," "discourseanaly*," "phenomenological psychology," and "empiri-cal phenomenological" - in the PsycINFO databaseduring four time intervals since 1900 (i.e., 1900-1969,1970-1979, 1980-1989, and 1990-1999) are shown inTable 1. It can be seen that the pattern of hits for thetwo search terms having to do with phenomenology isdifferent than that for each of the other three terms.First, it is only "phenomenological psychology" thatappeared in the literature with any frequency of noteprior to 1970. This is likely explained by the history ofthis term, which goes back to 1925 when Husserl paidattention to it (see above). Second, it is evident thatthe term "empirical phenomenological" started toappear in the 1970s comparatively more than did"qualitative research," "grounded theory," and "dis-course analy*." By that time, Giorgi's (1970) pioneer-ing effort to apply phenomenology empirically to psy-chological phenomena was beginning to take effect,in advance of other approaches to qualitativeresearch, certainly in psychology. Finally, it is appar-ent that the pattern of hits for the two search termshaving to do with phenomenology is similar for the'70s, '80s, and '90s.

As Table 1 indicates, then, apart from "phenome-nological psychology" and "empirical phenomenolo-gy," a sharp rise in the appearance of our search termsbegan in the '80s, and increased further in the '90s. Itcan be seen that this rise across these two decades faroutstrips the increase in records as a whole.


TABLE 1Growth of Search Term Hits in PsycINFO Database

SEARCH TERMS

Decade Total Records Qualitative Research Grounded Theory Discourse Analysis PhenomenologyPP EP Totals

1900-1969

1970-1979

1980-1989

1990-1999

Totals

347,545

270,445

442,551

543,743

1,604,284

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

14

30

6472

324460

392536

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

00

11

2127

178216

200244

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

02

43

2826

408265

440296

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

PsychOther

242

883

752

691

2568

20

120

410

391

941

278

1087

229127

1,018943

1,3821,085

PP = Phenomenological Psychology; EP = Empirical Phenomenological; Psych = Psychology; Other = Non Psychology.

TABLE 2Growth of Search Term Records in Dissertation Abstracts International Database

SEARCH TERMS

Decade

1900-19691970-19791980-19891990-1999

Totals

Total Records

351,780356,801394,470566,258

1,669,309

Qualitative Research

01

5562,7263,283

Grounded Theory

013

5822,1352,730

Discourse Analysis Phenomenology

010

253692955

PP

39171948

EP

08

7349130

Totals

341

1,4815,6217,146

PP = Phenomenological Psychology; EP = Empirical Phenomenological.

Specifically, the number of total records for all publi-cations increased by a factor of 2.3 between the 1970sand the 1990s. In contrast, the number of hits for"qualitative research" went from 3 to 784; "groundedtheory" from 2 to 394; and "discourse analy*" from 7to 673.

Dissertation Abstracts International. As indicated above,PsycINFO addresses dissertations coming out of the dis-cipline of psychology only, whereas the databaseaddresses books, chapters, and journals from manyother disciplines as well. It was also indicated abovethat those dissertations entailing our search terms areincluded in Table 1. Having gone to DAI, then, thereturns from our search for the terms in this databaseare shown in Table 2. It must be remembered that, inthis analysis, we made no attempt to isolate "other"dissertations from "psychology" dissertations. Nor didwe look for false positives in the records. Thus, thesefigures must be inflationary compared to those fromPsycINFO. Even so, the data in this table relate well tothose in Table 1 in showing that a sharp rise in thesearch terms other than the ones to do with phenome-nological psychology began in the '80s.

Overlap of search terms. As indicated, the data in theabove two tables represent the returns from a proce-dure in which each of the five terms was searched sepa-rately. This procedure thus did not control for overlapbetween terms in the same record in a database. Asubsequent analysis was done to examine the extent ofthe overlap in the records prior to any weeding forfalse positives. The results of this analysis are shownin Table 3.

In terms of PsycINFO, it can be seen that in Part 1 ofthe table there were two main overlaps. The first wasbetween the term "qualitative research" and the othersearch terms, as would be expected. There were 118instances in which the terms depicting the fourapproaches to qualitative research overlapped with"qualitative research." The second entailed 13instances of overlap between "phenomenological psy-chology" and "empirical phenomenological." Giventhat the total number of records for "qualitativeresearch" was 928, and for "phenomenological psy-chology" was 264, the overlaps amount to 12.2% inthe first case and 5% in the second. Thus, the inci-dence of hits needs to be revised downwards to thatextent. Given that our interest is exploratory, howev-


TABLESOverlap of Search Terms 1900-1999

1. PsydNFO Database

Grounded Theory(527)

Grounded Theory (527)Qualitative Research (1,160)Discourse Analy* (1,101)Phenom Psych (366)Empirical Phenomen (108)

—————

Qualitative Research(1,160)

76————

Discourse Analy*(1,101)

532———

Phenomen Psych(366)

180

——

Empirical Phenomen(108)

02013—

2. Dissertation Abstracts International Database

Grounded Theory Qualitative Research(2,730)

Grounded Theory (2,730) —Qualitative Research (3,283) —Discourse Analy* (955) —Phenom Psych (48) —Empirical Phenom (130) —

Note: The numbers in brackets are the total

(3,283)256————

number of records.

Discourse Analy*(955)

811———

Phenomen Psych(48)

012

——

Empirical Phenom(130)

0301

—

TABLE 4Hits in Terms of Source, Region, and Type of Publication in Psychology and Other Disciplines (PsydNFO)

Source

QualResearch

GroundedTheory

DiscourseAnalysis

PhenomenPsych

EmpiricalPhenom

Disc

PsyOther

PsyOther

PsyOther

PsyOther

PsyOther

Book

3290

17

5023

172

50

Chap

3030

1613

7020

60

00

Jrnl

308414

99193

296244

2263

171

Diss

222

8431

249

73

720

NA

249383

161210

175173

1736

871

UK+Irlnd

6866

196

14440

180

10

Sc

1915

813

1514

110

20

Region

Au +Nz

112797

232220

00

Focus

Ger

1412

01

1915

121

00

S.Afr

101

01

110

60

20

Other

2132

36

5332

341

20

Mthd

213263

2930

11346

1145

30

App

179273

171214

327250

1423

911

Disc = Discipline (Psychology or Other); Chap = Chapter; Jrnl = Journal; Diss = Dissertation; NA = North America (US and Canada); UK +Irlnd = United Kingdom and Ireland; SC = Scandinavia (including Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark); AU + NZ = Australia and NewZealand; Ger = Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands; S.Afr = South Africa; Other = Other countries including Belgium, Brazil, Chile,China, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Namibia, Poland, Portugal,Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, and Unknown Countries; Mthd = Methodology; App = Application; Qual = Qualitative;Psy = Psychology; Other Disciplines = Disciplines other than psychology; Phenom Psych = Phenomenological Psychology; EmpiricalPhenom = Empirical Phenomenology.

er, Table 1 still gives a reasonably accurate portrayal ofthe rise in incidence of the search terms.

Regarding DAI, Part 2 of Table 3 shows that thegreatest overlap was between "grounded theory" and"qualitative research," which amounted to 9.4% of therecords for the former term (see Table 2). Apart fromthese two terms, the overlap was small. Indeed, thereare only 11 overlaps between "discourse analy*" and

the 3,283 records for "qualitative research." We findthis discrepancy between grounded theory and dis-course analysis to be interesting and wonder if itreflects less affiliation with qualitative research amonggraduate students doing discourse analysis, the aboveremarks about the claimed inclusion of discourseanalysis in qualitative research notwithstanding. Inany case, taken as a whole the analysis of overlaps in


TABLE 5Psychology Journals Publishing five or More Articles Involving the Search Terms:

JOURNAL

Addiction (Health)American Journal of Community PsychologyBritish Journal of Guidance and CounsellingBritish Journal of Social PsychologyCanadian PsychologyCounseling PsychologistCounselling Psychology QuarterlyDisability, Handicap and Society (Rehabilitation)Discourse Processes (Language and Communication)Feminism and PsychologyHuman Communication ResearchHumanistic PsychologistJournal of Applied Behavioral ScienceJournal of Communication DisordersJournal of Community and Applied Social PsychologyJournal of Counseling PsychologyJournal of Family Therapy (Counselling)Journal of Health PsychologyJournal of Language and Social PsychologyJournal of Marital and Family therapy (Counselling)Journal of Phenomenological PsychologyJournal of Pragmatics (Language and Communication)Journal of the Association for Persons with Severe Handicaps (Health)Narrative Inquiry (Language and Communication)Philosophical PsychologyPsychoanalytic DialoguesPsychologistPsychology and HealthSouth African Journal of PsychologySport PsychologistTheory & PsychologyTopics in Language Disorders

Note: Focus of some journals indicated in parentheses.QR = "qualitative research"; GT = "grounded theory"; DA = "discourse analy*nomenological ".

QR855

10744

1

41

4728

66

5

7163

2

"; PP =

GT

3143

1

36

1

12

23

"phenomenological

DA PP EP

11713

15116

2 2559137

10

181 854

667

211

73

psychology"; EP = "empirical phe-

the DAI search does not appreciably alter the pictureof growth given in Table 2, despite our having chosenterms that in some cases were expected to overlap.

Type of document, region of origin, type of publication, andfocus of publication: Psychology and other disciplines(PsycINFO only). Table 4 gives a breakdown of the hitsof the five search terms regarding the type of docu-ment (book, chapter, journal article or dissertation);region yielding the document; and focus of the docu-ment (emphasis on methodology vs. application ofmethod). In each case, a further breakdown is madebetween what, we decided, are "psychology" versus"other" publications. The values entered into thistable are collapsed across the time intervals used inTable 1. It is important to mention that the valuesgiven in the table with respect to dissertations refer tothose cited by PsycINFO, not to the returns from our

search of DAI. (We used the former database for thistable despite its incompleteness relative to what thelatter search gave because to delete the dissertationdata would have required a re-analysis of all ourPsycINFO data.)

The comparisons that stand out for us are as fol-lows. First, the term "qualitative research" was foundmore in the "other" than in the "psychology" publica-tions (536 vs. 392). Second, in all regions except theUnited Kingdom and Ireland, the hits for "discourseanaly*" were fairly evenly distributed between the dis-cipline of psychology and the other fields (296 vs.256). In the UK and Ireland, on the other hand, "dis-course analy*" was much more pertinent to psycholo-gy than to the other fields (144 vs. 40). Third, theterms "phenomenological psychology" and "empiricalphenomenological" overwhelming appeared in psy-chology publications and dissertations rather than in


TABLE 6Nonpsychology Journals Publishing 5 or More Articles Involving the Search Terms

JOURNAL

Advances in NursingAmerican Journal of Occupational Therapy (Health)Archives of Psychiatric NursingExceptional Children (Education)Family Practice (Health)Health Care For Women InternationalHealth Education ResearchIMAGE: Journal for Nursing ScholarshipInternational Journal of Linguistics (Language and Communication)International Journal of Nursing StudiesIssues in Mental Health Nursing (Nursing)Journal of Research in Science Teaching (Education)Journal of Social IssuesJournal of Market Research SocietyJournal of Narrative and Life History (Language and Communication)Language in SocietyModern Language JournalMusic Therapy (Counselling)Nursing ResearchQualitative Health Research 1Research in Nursing and Health (Nursing)Review of Educational ResearchScandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences (Health)Scholarly Inquiry for Nursing PracticeSocial Science and Medicine (Health)Teaching and Teacher's EducationWestern Journal of Nursing Research

Note: Focus of some journals indicated in parentheses.QR = "qualitative research"; GT = "grounded theory"; DA = "discourse analy*nomenological."

QR271561

104

2314

21

52

788531

13

1

"; PP =

GT

659

4101

13

343

12299

855

8

"phenomenological

DA PP EP

2

11152131

33146

4

15

psychology"; EP = "empirical phe-

those coming from other fields (350 vs. 9). Also, the"phenomenological psychology" and "empirical phe-nomenology" publications and dissertations camemainly from North Americans (269 vs. 92). Finally,publications involving the "grounded theory" and"empirical phenomenology" search terms addressedthe application of these methods more than theirmethodologies. Also, publications entailing "discourseanaly*" that focused on methodology were more fre-quent in psychology than in other disciplines.

JOURNALS PUBLISHING THE SEARCH TERMSWe focused more narrowly on just one of the fourdocument types -journals - and broke them into"psychology" vs. "other" journals. All told, as of thefall of 1999, PsycINFOhad records for 1,490journals inboth of these categories combined. Of these, 496(32.3%) published at least one article picked up byour search terms as we defined them. As indicated,we felt that it was important to distinguish betweenjournals, books, and chapters that seemed to comefrom inside as opposed to outside psychology, eventhough the latter were included in PsycINFO. (For

examples of our breakdown of publications, compareTables 5 and 6 below.) Because only those publica-tions from outside psychology deemed relevant to psy-chology are recorded by this database, however, our"other" category represents the qualitative researchpublications in these other fields less than does our"psychology" category as a representation of publica-tions in the discipline of psychology.

Psychology. There were 315 journals that we judged topertain to the field of psychology. There were 946 hitsof the search terms among these journals (see Table4). The distribution of hits was as follows: range = 1-195; median = between 1 and 2; mode = 1; mean = 3.0.The high end of the range resulted from the hits forthe phenomenological search terms appearing in theJournal of Phenomenological Psychology. Accordingly, themode and median are more representative than themean as indicators of the typical extent to which oneor more of the five search terms appeared in each ofthe 315 journals.

In order to isolate the journals that were mostactive in the publication of the articles involving the


search terms, we set a cut-off of five hits or more forall search terms taken collectively, based on our senseof the literature. Table 5 shows the frequency of hitsof each of the five search terms for the 32 journalsmeeting this criterion. The term "qualitativeresearch" was a hit at least once for 22 of these jour-nals; "discourse analy*" for 22; "grounded theory" for12; "phenomenological psychology" for 2; and "empir-ical phenomenological" for 2. Among the journalsinvolved, seven have to do with language and commu-nication; seven with counselling and psychotherapy;six with health, rehabilitation or sport psychology; andtwo with community psychology. The remaining 11are mixed. Lastly, of what may be described as flag-ship journals of national psychological associations,only Canadian Psychology and the South African Journalof Psychology were in this group of journals that pub-lished at least five articles involving the search terms.

Other journals. According to our judgment, 181 of thejournals listed by PsycINFO, and for which our searchterms were relevant, had to do with fields outside psy-chology. As can be determined from Table 4, the totalnumber of hits for these "other" journals was 855.Across these journals, the distribution of hits was asfollows: range = 1-211; mode = 1; median = between 1and 2; mean = 4.7. The high end of the range wascaused by the hits for "qualitative research" inQualitative Health Research. Thus, this particular jour-nal created a large skew in the average number of hits,analogous to the skew created by the Journal ofPhenomenological Psychology in the case of the "psycholo-gy" journals. Accordingly, the mode and the medianare the best indicators of central tendency for these"other" journals as well, and, as is evident, these valuesare quite small.

Parallel to the approach used for the "psychology"journals, for these "other" journals we isolated thosethat had five or more hits of the five search termstaken collectively. The results are given in Table 6. Itcan be seen that 27 of the 181 journals met this criteri-on. The term "qualitative research" was a hit at leastonce for 22 of them; "grounded theory" for 17; "dis-course analy*" for 15; while "phenomenological psy-chology" and "empirical phenomenological" occurredin none. Thus, the pattern for these journals is differ-ent than that of the "psychology" journals in the sensethat reference to grounded theory is now on par withdiscourse analysis, and there was no reference at all tothe use of the phenomenological approach to qualita-tive research. Lastly, when these "other" journals wereclassified according to disciplinary fields, three pre-dominated, namely Nursing = 9, other Health disci-plines = 7, and Education = 4.

DiscussionStrictly speaking, this study was about the rise of theappearance of five search terms judged by us to bepertinent to qualitative research more than it wasabout the rise of qualitative research per se. Our mostinclusive term was "qualitative research," which weemployed knowing that it would overlap to someextent with our other search terms. As for particularqualitative research methods, after experimentingwith a number of search terms, we settled on termshaving to do with grounded theory, discourse analysis,phenomenological psychology, and empirical phe-nomenology. We also included conversation analysis,narrative analysis, and pragmatics into discourse analy-sis whenever they appeared under the "discourseanaly*" search term but did not search them in theirown right. On the whole, doubtless many documentswere missed in our search. Despite the many limita-tions of the study, however, it is likely that our findingsreflect an actual marked rise of qualitative research.

Before turning to PsycINFO, we had the impressionthat the uptake of qualitative research has beengreater in some fields other than psychology. Thus,the coverage given by the database to these otherfields offered a chance to check on that impression.And so we made the partition between psychology andother fields, knowing that it would underrepresent thequalitative research activity in those fields because ofthe only partial coverage of them given by this particu-lar database.

It was thus interesting to find that, despite this limi-tation, grounded theory evidently is used more innursing than in psychology (compare Tables 5 and 6).Alternatively, the approach favoured by psychologiststaken as a whole would appear to be discourse analy-sis. In this regard, it is useful to keep in mind that psy-chologists engaging in discourse analysis in theUnited Kingdom draw heavily on poststructural andpostmodern thought, whereas those in the UnitedStates tend to be more modernist (Reicher, 2000;Roiser, 1997).

More broadly, we are rather surprised by whatseems to be the strength of qualitative research inother health fields in addition to nursing. On theother side of the coin, we notice few qualitativeresearch indicators for sociology and social work. Wefound only one hit among our search terms in theAmerican Journal of Sociology and five hits distributedamong Social Work Research, Social Work Research andAbstracts, and Social Work with Groups. These small fre-quencies are in line with what we found for two presti-gious APA journals that are traditionally positivistic(i.e., the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology andthe Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, which


had one hit each). It is possible, of course, thatPsycINFO has under-represented coverage of journalsin these two disciplines compared to health carefields.

Admittedly, precisely because DAI applies to all dis-ciplines, it offered an opportunity to make an objec-tive estimate of the qualitative research activity in psy-chology versus other fields, at least in terms of thework by graduate students. However, to do so wouldhave necessitated poring over more than twice asmany abstracts as we derived from PsycINFO and stud-ied. Moreover, just as PsycINFO reported studies com-ing from outside the field of psychology, there aredatabases such as MedLINE and ERIC directed toother fields that include studies by psychologists.Ideally, they would have been used as well. We com-mend others to these tasks. We were not up to them.

Overall, the rise in qualitative research as reflectedby three of our search terms, at least, has been dra-matic, especially in the last 10 years or so. It is crucial,however, to look at the growth in the right way. Onthe one hand, it is the case that, according to evenonly one database (i.e., PsycINFO) qualitative researchpapers made their way into 496 journals in and out-side psychology, by the end of 1999. On the otherhand, for most of these journals the modal number ofpublications was one. This record is hardly a sign of amajor shift by these journals toward publishing arti-cles involving our search terms. Instead, the growthof publication has been heavily swayed by the produc-tion of just a few journals that were created for qualita-tive research - the Journal of Phenomenology Psychologyand Qualitative Health Research in particular. Tuckedwell behind that impact, but still by a large margingreater than is characteristic of the 496 journals takenas a whole, is the contribution of those journals thatwe tabulated in Tables 5 and 6. A few of these arejournals that have been firmly located in the main-stream and are thus noteworthy. We are thinkingespecially of the Journal of Counseling Psychology andCanadian Psychology, with 14 and 20 hits, respectively.But their publication of qualitative research articlesreflects the sentiments of the editors they have hadover the past 10-15 years, at least in part. Thus, theformer has been under the editorship of Clara Hill,whose own research has taken a qualitative turn (seeHill, Thompson, & Williams, 1997). Meanwhile, twoof the editors of Canadian Psychology from the '80s onhave been John Conway and Patrick O'Neill, both ofwhom have practiced qualitative research (e.g.,McMullen & Conway, 1994; O'Neill, 1998).

In making the above sobering remarks, we do notwish to go too far toward scepticism. Whatever is thesituation regarding journals, the increases in hits of

our search terms pertained to books and chapters asmuch as to journal articles (except for the phenome-nological search terms). There is no question thatthere is a ready market these days for such material, asreflected in the emphasis given it by the publisher,Sage. The publication of books and chapters is agood way to bypass journal editorial prejudices. Asbooks and chapters mount, they signal a shift in thewind. Graduate students take notice and force theirsupervisors to take notice along with them(McMullen, 2002; Rennie, Watson, & Monteiro,2000), and courses in qualitative research begin to beoffered (Stoppard, 2002). Professional conferencesstart getting proposals for qualitative research papersand put them on their programs as a result.Eventually, journal editors start to take notice. Someof them set up special sections or issues, as a way ofstepping in the water. Others go so far as to invitequalitative research manuscripts for regular issues.

All of this has been happening but it is still tooearly to declare that a rupture in the dominance ofpositivism is now underway, at least according to ourfindings. The number of PsycINFO hits involving oursearch terms (including overlaps among them) in the1990s, constituted only 0.45% of the total number ofPsycINFO records for that decade. As we have empha-sized throughout, our study is directed toward thecomparative rise of the appearance of five searchterms across decades rather than to the actual numberof publications having to do with qualitative research.But, on that score, even if our estimation of qualitativeresearch activity in the '90s underestimates the actualactivity by a factor of 20, the actual activity would stillonly amount to 9% of the whole. In this light,whether the increase in qualitative research repre-sents the beginning of a significant shift in the con-duct of psychological research as suggested by O'Neill(2002) remains to be seen.

This article is derived from a paper presented in a panelon "Qualitative Psychology: History, Theory and Practice"(Michael Krai, Chair) at the annual meeting of theCanadian Psychological Association, Ottawa, June 2000.The authors appreciate the support given this study by theFaculty of Arts, York University and comments by anony-mous reviewers on an earlier draft. Correspondence maybe directed to David Rennie, Department of Psychology,York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J IPS.(E-mail: [email protected]).


ResumeUne etude est presentee sur la montee de la recherchequalitative en psychologic au cours du XXe siecle.L'incidence de la recherche qualitative a etc revelee par larecherche de plusieurs mots-cles (p.ex. « qualitativeresearch », « grounded theory », « discourse analy* », «empirical phenomenological » et « phenomenologicalpsychology ») dans les bases de donnees PsycINFO etDissertation Abstracts International. On a trouve, qu'a1'exception des termes de recherche portant sur laphenomenologie, les notices bibliographiques contenantces termes de recherche n'existaient pas a toute fin pra-tique avant les annees quatre-vingts, ou on a connu unemontee prononcee qui s'est intensifiee au cours des anneequatre-vingt-dix. Les notices PsycINFO ont ete triees enfonction des criteres suivants : 1) si elles provenaient de lapsychologic ou d'autres disciplines en sciences sociales oude la sante, 2) la region d'origine, 3) les types de docu-ments auxquels il est fait reference et 4) si ces documentsportaient sur la methodologie ou 1'application de larecherche qualitative. Un certain nombre de differencesinteressantes ont emerge de cette analyse comparative. Lesconsequences de ces decouvertes a 1'effet qu'un change-ment de paradigme pourrait etre en cours sont abordees.

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