DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

across the qualitative movement, arguably provided a common thread that helped to
bind the emerging qualitative school together.
In the early 1990s, Smith first developed IPA (Interpretative
Phenomenological Analysis), which became a widely-used technique of qualitative
analysis in psychology. Its success and popularity can be attributed to the fact that it
cuts a middle-way between the three main qualitative schools of discursive,
phenomenological and realist, honouring key tenets of each but combining them into a
practical set of methodological injunctions. Like the discursive school, IPA accepts
that the research process is deeply hermeneutic, with both researcher and participant
engaged in interpretative acts, and accepts contextual and socio-political influences on
the knowledge-gathering process. Like the phenomenological school, it asks for a
researcher to move past text to study the experiential lifeworld of participants, and to
connect with individuals in a direct way rather than through the veil of their prior
assumptions and categories. Like the realist school, it accepts the reality of a world
which is independent of our cognition, against which we can evaluate our interpretive
schemes to assess their quality and validity. IPA is sometimes linked with a critical
realist philosophy (Fade, 2004), which suggests that it fits well with the epistemology
set out in Chapter 3.
Since 2000 the qualitative momentum has continued in psychology, with more
textbooks appearing, more conferences being arranged, more qualitative journal
articles being produced and there is now a journal dedicated to the discussion and use
of qualitative techniques in psychology. Despite this continued growth, qualitative
techniques in psychology are still peripheral and still shunned by much of the
establishment. Many mainstream journals will not publish qualitative research, and
many undergraduate courses barely touch on the methods involved. The reason that
qualitative methods have remained peripheral is arguably political. It can be argued
that orthodoxy prefers the exclusive use of quantitative methods, as it is a way of
maintaining the status quo. Quantitative research uses the hypothetico-deductive
model and is therefore suited to testing theory that has already been developed. If you
can only test hypotheses from existing theory, you have little chance of finding a new
theory, and so the status-quo is reinforced. Qualitative methods, on the other hand,
are tools for exploration and for the development of new ideas; they can generate new
questions, new theories and new models, so are inherently subversive (Parker, 2005).
49