Qualitative Research Methods for Psychologists

CONSTANCE T. FISCHER, Ph.D., ABPP, is a professor at Duquesne University, where she has taught since 1966. Following an undergraduate degree in political science at the University of Oklahoma, she began graduate studies at the University of Kentucky, with a primary interest in social psychology which then included the Kurt Lewin tradition of field observation and field experimentBclose to life. However, she did not want to work in academia, so she opted for a clinical concentration; because clinical psychology at the time was pretty much restricted to mental hospitals and child clinics, her goal instead was to pursue preventative psychology in the community (which later came into being under President Kennedy as community psychology). Ironically, she became a professor of clinical psychology.

At Duquesne, the department was devoted to establishing philosophical and research foundations as well as practices for psychology conceived as a human science, then primarily based in European phenomenology, and now more broadly hermeneutic. In addition to joining in the department=s development of empirical phenomenological research methods, Dr. Fischer initiated a similar approach to psychological assessment in which clients collaborate to develop individualized understandings of their situations, comportment, and options. She published Individualizing Psychological Assessment in addition to about 70 other publications on this approach, and about 40 publications on other topics, mostly about human science psychology and qualitative psychology, along with some traditional experimental studies. She has directed 25 dissertations based on qualitative research. Her published qualitative studies include ones on being criminally victimized (with F. Wertz), being in privacy, being intimate, three styles of living back pain (with M. A. Murphy), and becoming angry.