Staying close and reflexive: An explorative and reflexive approach to qualitative research on psychotherapy

Qualitative research has the potential to explore patient and therapist experiences of psychotherapeutic processes, as well as the challenges and opportunities inherent in relational and technical aspects of therapy. This paper examines explorative and reflexive ways of doing qualitative research on psychotherapy, based on the ontological and epistemological premises of hermeneutic phenomenology. An explorative-reflective thematic analysis is presented as a team-based approach, with a firm and transparent structure to the process of finding and interpreting experiential commonalities and differences in empirical material from semi-structured interviews. We use two examples of the interplay between phenomenological exploration and reflexivity from the interviews of two adolescent psychotherapy patients in a research project examining experiences of useful ways to establish a productive therapeutic relationship. A systematic way of conducting explorative-reflexive thematic analysis in a research team and with the assistance of computer software is described and discussed. It is emphasized that the procedures in themselves do not guarantee the result - they will only contribute if they also stimulate self-reflexivity and awareness of the researchers as interpreters of basically ambiguous human experience.