DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

The humanistic psychology movement gave another impetus to qualitative
methods in the 1970s. Humanistic psychology emphasised holism, human agency,
existential concerns such as love and the search for meaning, goals and motivation,
empathy and subjective experience. It viewed quantitative methods as better suited to
an atomistic, mechanistic approach, unable to grasp the systemic wholeness and
context of being human, and so roundly rejected them:
“Traditional mathematics and logic, in spite of their unlimited possibilities, seem
actually to be handmaidens in the service of an atomistic, mechanical view of the
world.” (Maslow, 1954, p.236)
In the early 1980s the humanistic movement spawned a methodological sourcebook,
Human Enquiry (Rowan and Reason, 1981), which set out a humanistic philosophy
and set of techniques for qualitative research. Humanistic research is a realist
approach to psychology in that it assumes a real human world beyond text and
develops theories at all levels of generality, including theories about human beings in
general, for example Rogers’ universal motive for self-actualisation (Rogers, 1961),
or Maslow’s universal dynamics of motivation (Maslow, 1954).
In the mid-1980s, qualitative research took on more of an established identity
in psychology, but also, somewhat paradoxically, became more divided and
heterogeneous (Hammersley, 1996), as it separated into different epistemologies and
techniques. Three of the main types of qualitative approach that emerged in the 1980s
were 1) empiricist/realist, 2) phenomenological and 3) discursive (Henwood and
Pidgeon, 1994).
1) The empiricist/realist approach
The origins of this approach is often linked to the sourcebook of Miles and
Huberman (1984). This method is generally considered to work according to the
same basic epistemology of the natural sciences; researchers are simply documenting
and discovering a real, un-interpreted world ‘out there’ with our senses (Henwood and
Pidgeon, 1994). However, this is not the actual epistemological position described in
Miles and Huberman’s original sourcebook, and is further removed from their 1994
revised sourcebook, for in both books they openly admit to the hermeneutic
challenges and interpretative ‘quagmires’ of research and theory building. Miles and
Huberman’s approach is a major influence on the composite method used in this
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