Doing Qualitative Research Differently

Wendy Hollway is Emeritus Professor in Psychology at the Open University. She is a social and qualitative psychologist with a particular interest in psychoanalytic epistemology and its application to empirical research methodology. With Tony Jefferson, she co-authored Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method, which explored the implications of positin a defended subject for interview research (2nd edition, 2013). In subsequent research, she has developed psychoanalytically informed methods in an empirical project on identity changes involved in becoming mothers, using principles of psychoanalytic (infant) observation in parallel with the Free Association Narrative Interview method. Her recent and current writing documents the implications of British post-Kleinian psychoanalysis for data generation, data analysis, writing and research ethics, based on longitudinal data from interviews, reflective fieldnotes, observation notes and observation seminars with 20 becoming mothers in Tower Hamlets. She is a co-founder of the British Psychosocial Studies Network and the European Psycho-societal Research Group. In 2011, she was a visiting Fellow at the Oslo Centre for Advanced Study, in a program entitled Personal Development and Socio-cultural Change, directed by Profs Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen and Hanne Haavind, from which collaborations continue.