DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

life and world started to take on an almost tangibly grey hue, and I found that I was
tense a lot, and my physical health was poor. The office had nylon carpets
everywhere, so I would get electric shocks of everything metal, which added to the
sense of Pavlovian punishment! I think I may have been a bit of a dark cloud in the
office, which meant that my colleagues were not particularly enamoured with me.
This led to a sense of isolation. Meanwhile, I was unable to find romance in my life,
and I was still hurting over leaving my girlfriend earlier that year. I felt a growing
need to write at the time, and starting writing a book on psychology in my free time –
spending weekends in the British Library, and evenings at my computer in bedroom.
I was planning to leave and had made my intentions known to my boss when the
company went into receivership. I was fired, with the majority of other workers.
That day felt like a release and my colleagues couldn’t understand why I was so
happy. After being fired, I set up a freelance business in market research, which
covered me financially for six months before I managed to get a place to do a PhD.
The crisis was a personal example of how hard times can be a profound and important
stimulus for meaningful change; it allowed me to connect with my vocation in
psychology.
Could it be that this episode acted as an unconscious template both in
collecting and analysing the data? It could be that that is the case. However, I hope
the reader will feel, given the participant feedback and the carefully evidenced
empirical findings, that the data collection process and the data analysis did not distort
the data, and that what is presented is an honest and logical hermeneutic. The positive
side of this personal experience of crisis is that it may have helped gain an empathic
connection with the lifeworlds of my respondents; a valuable commodity in rapport
building, interview direction, question probing and analytical interpretation.
10.10 Impact, Resonance and Potential Application
A key criterion of validity in qualitative research is potential impact and
implication of research findings, in theoretical and practical terms. Research should
not just be rigorous, transparent, credible and sensitive, but should make a difference
to knowledge and/or applied settings, or have the potential to do so.
The research has a potential contribution to make to theory on adult
development and crisis. It is, as far as I am aware, the only empirically grounded
theory of early adult crisis there is. My research over the last four years located other
203