A field guide to the methods you'll see here
A handful of terms in the topic list will mean nothing if you don't already work in qualitative psychotherapy research — reflexivity, IPA, a wounded healer. This is a short, plain-language explanation of the ones that come up most, written for someone reading their first paper in the field rather than someone teaching a methods seminar. It's editorial content we wrote, not a DOAJ fact, so treat it as a starting point rather than a citation.
Reflexivity
Being explicit about how you, the researcher, shape the findings — your assumptions, your relationship to the topic, sometimes your own therapy history if you're studying therapists. In a field where the researcher often is a practising clinician, this isn't a courtesy paragraph; it's how readers judge whether your interpretation is doing the work, or you are.
Phenomenology
Trying to describe an experience as the person actually lived it, before it gets flattened into a category or a diagnosis. In psychotherapy research this usually means long, careful interviews with people who've been through something specific — grief, an eating disorder, a training crisis — and staying close to their own words rather than the textbook's.
Interpretative phenomenological analysis
IPA for short. A specific way of doing phenomenology: a handful of participants, in-depth interviews, and a close, line-by-line reading that moves from what someone said to what it might mean for how they make sense of their world. Common in UK counselling psychology, and the method behind a good share of the articles here.
4 articles tagged “interpretative phenomenological analysis” →
Reflexive thematic analysis
RTA. Identifying and naming patterns across a set of interviews or texts — but treated as an interpretive act the researcher actively shapes, not a mechanical count of repeated phrases. The 'reflexive' in the name is Braun and Clarke's, and it's a deliberate contrast with earlier, more procedural versions of thematic analysis.
Constructivist grounded theory
Grounded theory builds an explanation from the data itself rather than testing a theory you started with. The constructivist version, associated with Kathy Charmaz, adds that the theory you end up with is one particular reading of the data — shaped by researcher and participants together — not a single truth waiting to be extracted.
Autoethnography
Research where the data is the researcher's own experience, written up and analysed with the same rigour you'd apply to someone else's interview transcript. In a therapy journal it often means a practitioner examining their own case, breakdown, or professional turning point — which is harder to do honestly than it sounds.
Wounded healer
A phrase that goes back to Jung: the idea that a therapist's own psychological injuries aren't just a liability to be screened out in training, but can be part of what lets them recognise and sit with a client's pain. Recurs in EJQRP as a way of studying how therapists' personal histories inform their clinical work.
Therapist self-disclosure
The question of when, and how much, a therapist should reveal about themselves in session — a fact about their own life, a reaction to what the client just said. Long debated in the field, and a live one in the qualitative literature here, since practice on this varies a lot by orientation and individual therapist.
A note on citing an article
Cite the article, not this site — we don't hold copyright on anything here and wouldn't want the citation. A DOI resolves through https://doi.org/ and most reference managers (Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley) will pull full metadata straight from that link. If you're doing it by hand, APA 7th style looks roughly like: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of article. European Journal for Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy, Volume(Issue), pages. https://doi.org/xx.xxxxx/xxxxx — check the article page on the journal's own platform for the exact volume, issue and page numbers, since DOAJ's metadata doesn't always carry all three.
Definitions here are necessarily short. For the real thing, read the methods section of an article that uses the approach — that's the whole point of the method, really.