KOG gets grant funding!
Psychiatry & Philosophy Foundation awarded KOG grant in Open Call 2022, which was applied for to develop and share knowledge clips through the website koggz.co.uk. Psychiatry & Philosophy Foundation commended the intiative to disseminate qualitative research widely and easily and make it accessible to clinical researchers at universities, institutions and beyond. Psychiatry & Philosophy Foundation supports the mission of the KOG financially, as well as substantively, by informing its network. KOG sincerely thanks Psychiatry & Philosophy Foundation for this important support to enrich thinking in and about mental health care!
What?
KOG is developing knowledge products consisting of a series of 6 online tutorials on doing qualitative research. These tutorials include and connect ontological, epistemological, and methodological frameworks of qualitative research. They also provide navigation of the methodological literature and address common pitfalls in qualitative methodology.
Why?
In the current
evidence-based
discourse of scientific research, research methods are often applied without knowledge of or reflection on philosophical principles. In particular, because one scientific perspective (quantitative, experimental, hypothesis-testing) seems to be taken for granted, thus not carefully choosing between different approaches. Our project bridges the gap between philosophy and psychiatry by considering ontology (our ideas about what “reality” is), epistemology, (our ideas about what knowledge is), normativity (our ideas about what the good is) and methodology (how we concretely investigate phenomena) in conjunction with each other.
The use of qualitative research can enrich existing research practices and create more diversity and reflexivity. A key value of qualitative research is its ability to represent experiences in the respondent’s own words. This is also known as the “emic” perspective. The goal of qualitative research in the mental health field is often to understand in depth and make experiences of illness, care, and recovery more palpable (“verstehen”). Open modes of data collection (e.g., participatory observations and interviews) allow respondents the space to share what actually matters to them. This is in contrast to quantitative hypothesis-testing research in which the researcher exerts much stronger prior influence on what is considered important; for example, by strongly framing the topic on which respondents are surveyed in questionnaires in advance and limiting the response options. As such, qualitative research is also a way to counterbalance reductionism. Whereas context in quantitative research is still sometimes seen as “noise,” “understanding in context” is actually central to qualitative research. Due to its open-ended nature, qualitative research also provides more opportunities for surprising and refreshing insights into a phenomenon. In addition to the patient perspective, the experiences of caregivers, loved ones and their interactions can also be the subject of study, or on phenomena at the meso- or macro-level.
Goals
In a broad sense, our collective aims to support a culture change in the mental health industry in two areas: 1) thinking about and approaching mental health (by including first person perspectives and reflecting on dominant discourses) and 2) thinking about quality of care and support (through a movement from quantification and benchmarking to focusing on narrative approaches and critical questioning of conceptual frameworks to do justice to the complexity of care (see, for example: Cribb, 2021; Care Vision, 2022). We intend to do this by unlocking insights about ontology, epistemology and methodology of qualitative research in mental health.
Our specific goals regarding this application are:
- Development of a tutorial series that provides a basic course in qualitative research for interested students, researchers, mental health professionals and experiencers with no or limited prior knowledge.
Learning objectives for the tutorial are:
- Awareness and knowledge of different research paradigms and methodology
- Knowledge of connection between ontology, epistemology and methodology and reflection on these to arrive at an informed research design
- Basic knowledge of various qualitative methods, sufficient to design and conduct qualitative research
- Orientation in the field of qualitative research
When?
We are working from summer to winter 2023 on the scripts and recordings for knowledge clips.
Keep an eye on the website, or get your
here
email address to stay informed!
