DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

Interactive Model and Smith’s Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA).
These two methods brought their respective strengths to the research design and
together created a robust, problem-focused hybrid. IPA’s key contributions to the
method were its injunctions for developing topic guides for semi-structured interviews
and its protocols for handling raw narrative data, transcripts and early code-based
analysis. The Interactive Model’s key contributions were its multi-faceted approach
to purposive sampling, its focus on memos, and its use of matrices and diagrams to
help synthesise and present data. There are few points of conflict between the two
sources of the composite. A criticism could be that IPA is an inductive model and that
it is being used in an approach which combines both deductive and inductive
elements. This is true, but the basic tenets of IPA data collection and data analysis
lend themselves well to this slightly altered philosophy, and indeed give them wider
applicability, for they may be used in theory testing as well as theory development.
An additional benefit of combining methodologies is in demonstrating the similarities
that exist between qualitative methods, rather than the traditional focus on difference
between competing qualitative camps (Haywood, 2007).
Gaining sample for the project was contingent on individuals replying to
adverts or emails and volunteering; thus is was to some extent a ‘self-selecting’
sample. We can therefore reflect on the possible reasons and motivations
individuals might have had for answering the advertisements and participating in
the study. It may have been a chance to help externalise and fully develop a
narrative of transformation surrounding a painful past episode; to have a quasitherapeutic
interaction with a ‘psychologist’; or to admit past transgressions in an
anonymous context (several admitted to clandestine affairs that occurred during
the crisis). It is clear that all participations had recovered from crisis and
considered themselves to have grown as a result of the episode, even if the
solution was a long time in coming. However the clinical literature describes
individuals who do not recover from crisis and become trapped in a chronically
unstable state, perhaps because they cope maladaptively with crisis and get
caught in a destructive cycle of repeat and relapse rather than an upward
trajectory of resolution, so one must ask – why did the maladaptive crisis copers
not come forward to discuss their crises? There may have been a selective
attrition of this group in recruitment; it may be that these individuals did not
come forward to participate for three possible reasons. Firstly, they may end up
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