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Disintegrating Qualitative Research

BIRKBECK COLLEGE, s.frosh{at}bbk.ac.uk

This paper explores a tension in qualitative psychology between, on the one hand, a deconstructionist framework in which the human subject is understood as positioned in and through competing discourses and, on the other, a humanistic framework in which the integrity of the subject is taken to be both a starting- and end-point of analysis. This paper offers a critique of the tendency for qualitative research to seek to produce integrated `narratives' of experience and argues for the importance of maintaining the vision of a subject in fragments. It does so by taking up the notion of there being `things that can't be said' and suggesting that this refers to two distinct issues: the multiplicity of possible accounts of experience and the way language systematically excludes some `abjected' material. It finishes with an illustrative analysis of an interview text.

Key Words: language • narrative analysis • psychoanalysis • qualitative research

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