Qualitative psychosocial research aims to understand how people think, feel, and behave in natural settings. It focuses on understanding unique characteristics of individuals and groups and the meanings they attribute to life experiences. This is done through approaches like nomothetic, idiographic, and hermeneutic methods. The research process involves planning studies, collecting data through methods like interviews and observations, analyzing documents and qualitative data, and generating explanations rather than generalizing to populations. The goal is in-depth understanding rather than description.

1. QUALITATIVE
PSYCHOSOCIAL
RESEARCH
Sujit Kumar Kar
Associate Professor of
Psychiatry
King George’s Medical
University, Lucknow

2. RESEARCH IN PSYCHOLOGY:
AIMS
To scrutinize how people think, feel or behave
To find out factors that influence people’s thinking, feeling and behaviour
Exploring what meanings people attribute to things
Examining, how ideas, events and things are presented in language and made
sense
Consequences of how people think, feel or behave

3. RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Asking questions or making predictions about how things work
• Research questions & hypothesis
• Theories
• Selection of research methods according to research questions
Gathering evidences in the form of data
• Numerical or quantitative data
• Qualitative data
Generating and evaluating explanations of how things work

4. Data – evidences we gather to answer
the research questions
Hypothesis – predictions that we make
about the possible answer to the
research questions
Theories – reasons which generate
certain research questions and also
predict certain answers
 Theories are the explanation of things that we are
researching

5. TYPES OF RESEARCH
Three broad research paradigms
Quantitative research
Qualitative research
Mixed research – (both qualitative and
quantitative)

7. PSYCHOSOCIAL RESEARCH
Psychosocial research is the resultant of the
blending between the research dimensions
 Psychological aspects
 Social aspects

8. DESIGNING PSYCHOSOCIAL
RESEARCH: STEPS
Planning the experiment
Observational studies /
questionnaire studies/
psychometrics/ interviews/ case
studies and ethnography
Analyzing the documents
Gathering the data
Analysis of the data

9. Approaches of conducting
psychosocial research
Nomothetic method
Idiographic method
Hermeneutic method
Hayes (2000) “Doing Psychological Research: Gathering and Analyzing Data

10. NOMOTHETIC APPROACH
The focus is on large group of people sharing or
following a common law and having a unique pattern
of characteristics, that is applicable for each
individual entities of the group
Derived from the Greek word “Nomos”
means laws

11. IDIOGRAPHIC APPROACH
The focus is on detailed
evaluation of the unique
characteristics of the
individuals
Derived from Greek word
“Idios” means private or
personal

12. HERMENEUTIC APPROACH
It focuses upon the meanings
In this approach, meanings of life
experience, meaning at different
levels of consciousness of mind,
meanings of different social or
political or cultural phenomenon
are evaluated

13. WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU?

18. QUALITATIVE PSYCHOSOCIAL
RESEARCH
The characteristic features about qualitative psychosocial
research are –
 It is naturalistic – the psychosocial domains to studied in a natural
setting, inductive – non-evaluative and holistic.
 The focus of understanding is – the unique characteristics of groups
or individuals and the meanings that they attribute to different life
experiences or events.
 Qualitative research also aims at understanding the study population,
rather than generalizing it.
 Qualitative research is less descriptive and more intense than
quantitative research.

20. REFERENCES
Doing qualitative research in psychology- A practical
guide. Editor- Forrester, M. 2010. Sage Publications.