Am I a qualitative researcher?
In 2012, I met with two academics who would become my PhD supervisors the following year. I told them that I wanted to conduct research into women’s experiences of a condition called endometriosis . I wanted to know what clinicians could do to support women in the absence of effective treatment and a cure. They suggested I incorporate a qualitative component into my associated funding application. This made me nervous. I had just spent four years studying psychology, a discipline that can, shall we say, be desperately positivist. This education had taught me that ‘real’ research involved numbers. Why else had I just studied four years of statistics (a subject that I loved) and nothing else? Despite these ingrained beliefs, I could see how speaking with women was consistent with my research questions. It also made sense from a feminist perspective that women were the experts in this matter and should be privileged over the psychometrics (mostly designed by men, for men) that I had o...
