The Criteria For Qualitative Research In Psychology

Qualitative research was developed in western countries,which can be traced to 19 century. Two hundreds years after that , qualitative research came to be a kind of methodology which had it's own underpinning theories, well-equipped ways for conducting, plenty of the subset methods, as well as the progressive technology for the evaluation of the writings. It encompassed such a lot of pragmatic stances as postpositive, constructive, interpretative and critical theory. The subset methods included ethnography, discourse analysis, case study, grounded theory, phenomenology and participant observation and so on.The arise of qualitative research was motivated by the fast development of social investigation in anthropology and phenomenology, and by the resistance of the quantitative research which extremely highlighted the scientificness and objectivity and as a result ,let down the contemporary scholars. With the push of postmodernism, qualitative research obtained lots of support and, then critics. It was considered to be short of rigor, and require a set of criteria by which to apprise the qualitative researches. In fact, it had always been the dissatisfaction of the rigor that constrained the popularization of the qualitative research ever since its emergence. But we need to know which research is acceptable and which is not, so that become a big problem.In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a mass of arguments about the appropriate criteria for qualitative research, which stayed a mass up to now. The controversy around it in west countries was found mostly in the health enterprise and caring profession, and then psychology. When it comes to China, the most literatures was found in education, most of which talked about the definition, the method, the operation and particularly the application of qualitative research, as well as the difference between the qualitative and quantitative research and the possibility of integration. But different from the education, the application of the qualitative research in the psychology was infrequent, and the development stayed in the introduction stage, and the most concerns was about the theory or pragmatic foundation and the position of the qualitative research in psychology, and so on. Nevertheless, some researchers predicted that qualitative research would present a fast development in some fields of psychology, and researchers would try to do more and more practice researches. Trying to establish some criteria may help us when analysing and appreciating qualitative references in psychology, may furnish us with a better understanding of qualitative research, and may promote the diversification of methodology in psychology. Moreover, because qualitative can well serve the practitioners of psychology, for example, the counsellors, the argument and discussion in this paper can also improve some applied fields.This paper, at first, introduced the definition of qualitative research, differentiated it from the non-quantitative research. Then in order to get a better understanding of the complex of qualitative research, the researcher demonstrated the history of qualitative research to throw light on the reason of why it embraced such a lot of subset methods. Then the development of qualitative research in psychology specifically was illustrated. After the discussion about the possibility and feasibility of establishing some kind of standard for qualitative research, I elaborated the criteria most popular and acceptable. Through these detailed analysis of these existent standards, we may somewhat find the primary dimension behind these point of views to put forward some guidelines for the usage of qualitative research methodology in psychology. In the last part, the paper tentatively integrated all the criteria above. First of all, according to the main stages of qualitative research which was objective, the design, sampling, analysis and interpretation, according to Walsh and Down, we get to evaluate the structure of the research paper. Secondly, according to the paradigm of the researcher, we refer the research to the corresponding standard, such as the reliability and validity from positivism, the trustworthiness from constructivism, and the authenticity and transgressive validity from criticism. Finally, according to the standard acrossing the paradigms, we can analyse the reflexivity, ethical issues, and the influence of the research to the existing psychological theories.