Researching Therapy, Culture and Spirituality

It will be apparent from the other chapters in this book some of the challenges faced by researchers exploring this territory or landscape. It is now increasingly accepted, certainly within qualitative research that the researcher is part of the research process and that one of the signs of good qualitative research is reading about the researcher and their relationship with the research. The same is true but less well discussed for quantitative research (Lennie & West, 2010). Researchers are making less claims to objectivity within qualitative research and focusing much more on critical subjectivity using reflexivity (Etherington, 2004) to explore their relationship with the research process. The recognition of what one of us (WW) likes to call the researcher’s stance (in contrast to the modernist use of bias) is particularly useful with research into therapy and especially when it also involves culture and/or spirituality. We all have a stance or rather stances in relation to culture and spirituality. These need to be teased out before entering into any research project and need to be re-visited at regular intervals during the course of the project.