• Reaction

Expanding the Methodological Imagination

Michelle Fine
Graduate Center, City University of New York
This article contains reflections provoked by the articles in this volume of The
Counseling Psychologist. As a relative outsider to counseling psychology, the author
thoroughly enjoyed immersing herself in these contributions and then extracting a set
of thoughts inspired by the writers.

When Robert T. Carter, editor of The Counseling Psychologist (TCP),

asked me to write an epilogue/reaction to the Qualitative Methods volume
of TCP, I hesitated. Immersed in the debates of qualitative inquiry from
within psychology, I am a relative outsider to counseling psychology. I was
unsure that I would have much to contribute. After reading the contributions
to this special issue, however, I was seduced by the rich conversations held
in this journal between counseling psychology and qualitative methods.
I was most taken by the courage and intellectual stretch evidenced by
these writers in their attempt to bridge what Haverkamp and Young (2007
[TCP special issue, Part 3]) called the “taken for granted character of posi-
tivist assumptions” in counseling psychology and the “two solitudes” of
qualitative and quantitative work. In their own words, most of these contrib-
utors have been educated within, and encouraged to pursue, a postpositivist
paradigm. As Ponterotto and Grieger (2007 [this issue]) indicate, these
authors have learned from their students about the theoretical and empirical
possibilities of qualitative methods. Recognizing a serious and important
rupture in disciplinary ways of knowing, researching, writing, and making
claims, they set out to craft a volume that would educate the field, elders, and
newcomers on the range and variation of qualitative methods. Exploring
questions of epistemology, design, paradigms, methods, ethics, analysis, and
writing within a qualitative framework, they have successfully produced a
most satisfying volume that is at once a beginners guide to qualitative meth-
ods as well as a sophisticated journey into qualitative inquiry.

I want to note my appreciation for the careful feedback provided by both Susan Morrow and
Robert Carter. Thanks also to Ruth Hall and Donnie Cook for careful reading and friendship.
Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Michelle Fine, Graduate Center, City
University of New York, Social Personality Psychology, Urban Education and Women’s
Studies, 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 6304.17, New York, NY 10016; e-mail: mfine@gc.cuny.edu.
THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST, Vol. 35 No. 3, May 2007 459-473
DOI: 10.1177/0011000006296172
© 2007 by the Society of Counseling Psychology

459
460 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / May 2007

As I sat, ready to write, the late Gloria Anzaldua came to me, her words
always instructive when I need something “wholly new” to materialize, in
the messy borderlands between fields that have been estranged:

At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the
opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed
so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and
eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant cul-
ture, write it off all together as a lost cause and cross the border into a wholly
new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are
numerous once we decide to act and not react. (Anzaldua, 1987, p. 25)

This volume of TCP indeed crosses borders, written at once through

“serpent eyes” of practice (on the ground) and “eagle eyes” of theory (fly-
ing over), “charting wholly new and separate territory” with a disciplinary
commitment to “act (and not react),” within counseling psychology,
through qualitative methods and toward social justice.
Offering readers a comprehensive textbook for qualitative methods, the
volume moves gently across questions of epistemology, ethics, and the
micropractices of design, methods, analysis, and audience. Each essay,
stocked with informative and comprehensive tables, is crafted carefully at
the intersection of counseling psychology and qualitative methods. After
surveying the points of overlap, the writers then dive into a third dimen-
sion—digging deeply at the intersections and excavating new thoughts,
radical reconceptualizations, and creative possibilities of method for coun-
seling psychology. As Anzaldua (1987) predicted, some essays “disengage
[entirely] from the dominant culture,” rejecting quantitative and experi-
mental methods as well as dehistoricized views of the self. Others stretch
between “both shores at once,” inventing a language of translation bridging
postpositivism to critical, qualitative work.
In this borderland volume, the TCP authors collectively launch a research
framework for qualitative research that sheds light on social (in)justice, chal-
lenges, social misrepresentations, and resituates lives in history, oppression,
context. Reflecting on qualitative methods as a way to humanize social
experience, to place individuals in rich historic and social contexts, and to
understand human behavior in all of its complexity, the authors present ways
of working with qualitative material that are at once interpretive and sys-
tematic; complex and rigorous; grounded in the lives and words of partici-
pants, and methodologically valid. That is, these authors refuse to ignore
questions of systematicity, validity, or even generalizability, and they also
refuse to superimpose quantitative standards onto qualitative work. Instead,
they conceptualize translation standards of research quality; they create a
 Fine / EXPANDING THE METHODOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 461

borderland for conversations about quality, rigor, and use of qualitative

social inquiry in politically contentious times.
There is no question about the political and intellectual significance of
this volume of TCP. In a nation scarred by a growing wealth gap, where the
media speak primarily through the eyes of class privilege, whiteness, and
heteronormativity, few can—or will—bear witness to the depth, variability,
and complexity of human experience, oppression, and resistance. Today,
multiple conservatizing forces bear down on the academy in general and
psychology in particular. Federal funding opportunities reinscribe experi-
mental research, a focus on the individual, investigations of the brain, a
flight from research on social issues. In concert with managed care and the
rise of pharmaceuticals, students and colleagues in psychology are being
discouraged away from critical research and practice. It is not just that only
10% of counseling psychology programs teach qualitative methods, as
Ponterotto and Grieger (2007) tell us (although that is astonishing). There
is explicit federal and professional pressure to squeeze educational and psy-
chological psychology back into randomized, context-stripped, experimen-
tal designs (and out of real communities), a radical retreat from affirmative
action and multiculturalism, as clinical psychology is being led back to a
medical model. These strategic moves of power literally silence those most
in pain and those who can bear witness and dissent. With mass media,
research methods (and drugs) that keep us from seeing, hearing, and docu-
menting the complexity of human lives, we are on the cusp of what John
Dewey, in 1954, called the “eclipse of the public.”
In these very difficult times, this volume of TCP signifies a disciplinary
resistance to the slide to the right. Contributors with intellect, politics, status,
chutzpa, and grace offer what Anzaldua (1987) called a “wholly new way”
to think about research for social responsibility and justice, and what
Ponterrotto and Grieger (2007) call a “bimethodological world view.” Lifting
up the embers once lit brightly by luminaries like Carolyn Payton, who wrote
“Who Must Do the Hard Things?” (1984), these authors reposition counsel-
ing psychology as it might be—public, political, engaged, and critical.
Morrow (2007 [TCP special issue, Part 3]) sets the tone when she writes:

I envision qualitative inquiry as a central tool for bridging community and

academe by engaging research participants as coresearchers in matters that
concern their everyday lives. . . . Human agency and human rights would
become increasingly important topics of inquiry, and research would be
transformed into social action (p. 288).

No longer hesitant, I approached the task of “epiloguing” as a qualitative

researcher might. The articles are my data. My sample of authors may be tilt
462 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / May 2007

toward the critical/left/multiculturalist and may not, therefore, satisfy crite-

ria that would allow for “generalization” to the full universe of counseling
psychologists. My methods for analysis are discursive and theoretical,
enacted in two steps. First, I coded those epistemological moments in which
counseling psychology and qualitative methods inform each other. Then I
tried to develop four significant contributions that counseling psychology
brings to qualitative inquiry: (a) a broadened methodological imagination,
(b) complex consideration of how to analyze researchers’ subjectivities, (c)
methods for “jumping scale” and theorizing across levels of analysis, and (d)
reflections on writing qualitative articles within psychological journals.

WIDENING THE METHODOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

Written in and between the lines of these articles, there is a brazen call for a
new direction in counseling research, substantially widening what Creswell,
Hanson, Clark, and Morales (2007 [TCP special issue, Part 3]) called the
“methodological tool chest.” These authors eloquently ask researchers to con-
sider how assumptions of design sculpt scholarship. They pointed to differences
between and variations within five design forms: narrative, grounded theory,
case study, phenomenology, and participatory action research. From the same
research question, they cleverly construct five distinct designs so that readers can
appreciate the full weight and implications of design decisions. This article is a
fantastic overview that encourages qualitative researchers to resist the rush to
method (“I know I want to do a dissertation that involves interviews”) and reflect
thoughtfully on question, knowledge, and design. Feeling a bit greedy, I found
myself wanting more from these writers—more designs (ethnography? longitu-
dinal research? mixed methods?), more illustrations of how these five can over-
lap, and a more precise sense of how we might analyze material gathered using
these very distinct frameworks—a point to which I will return.
With equal strength, Haverkamp and Young (2007) walked readers
through the maze of paradigmatic choices and the question of the purpose
of our research. They delineate well the realist/postpositivist paradigm, the
interpretive/constructivist, and the critical/ideological. They elaborate the
distinctions across, and the wide variations within. Haverkamp and Young
hold our hands as we move from paradigm to research question and pur-
pose, insisting all along that researchers reflect intently on these decisions
as they bear significant consequence for our research. They speak elo-
quently about the emotions traveling throughout the volume, the emotions
embedded in any transition from the clarity of realism to the risks of inter-
pretation and critique. The authors call for qualitative researchers to
 Fine / EXPANDING THE METHODOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 463

develop a “philosophical literacy” and caution against “superficial versions

of qualitative methods” in an article that promises to be a classic.
Once paradigm and design are “settled” (although they never are in qual-
itative work), readers venture through the volume and come to realize that
researchers must still contend self-consciously with the complexity of what
constitutes evidence. Assistance can be found in “The Pond You Fish in
Determines the Fish You Catch,” in which Suzuki, Ahluwalia, Arora, and
Mattis (2007 [TCP special issue, Part 3]) chronicled a vast range of methods
and materials relevant to the study of lives and communities. They challenge
our disciplinary overreliance on talk and surveys and encourage researchers
to draw on physical data, including documents and records (e.g., driver’s
license, bank statements, letters, diaries), photos, drawings, video, pottery,
home movies, collections of and responses to cartoons and photos, and elec-
tronic data, synchronous (real time) and asynchronous (sources not updated
moment to moment), including emails, instant messages, listservs, bulletin
boards, guest books, chat rooms/online communities, and online surveys.
These authors and their colleagues in the journal are wonderfully
explicit: Data may be everywhere, but data are produced and constructed,
not low-hanging fruit awaiting picking. Suzuki et al. (2007) wrote:

Knowledge production is an intentional process. . . . As counseling psychol-

ogists, we are neither cameras, passively capturing a snapshot of the social
landscape, nor mirrors, reflecting back on objective reality. Instead we are
active agents seeking to learn about our world through each piece of data that
we collect. (p. 323)

To facilitate intentional knowledge production, the researchers deploy

quite novel methods and analytic strategies, exemplars of what Fine and
McClelland (2006) have called methodological release points—research
methods designed to release and provoke empirical material that would not
“normally” be forthcoming. To name a few:

• Image work (also called “visualization,” “active imagination,” and “guided

fantasy”), in which participants produce material residing, primarily, in the
unconscious.
• Narrative picturing, whereby participants provide a series of private visual-
izations and then sequence them as a movie.
• Restorying, such that researchers gather up an array of field texts from par-
ticipants (e.g., taking a test, being interviewed about the testing, writing a let-
ter to a friend about the experience) and then organize the material to tell
distinct stories about conflicts, characters, predicting the future, relation-
ships, situations, emotions, and so forth.
• Participatory action research projects designed to stir up and unleash the col-
lective coproduction of new forms of data and consciousness.
464 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / May 2007

This rich array of methods and evidence requires, however, equally rich
strategies for analysis. I was left inspired and spoiled, pondering how these
researchers could possibly bring together these varied forms of evidence; that
is, how do they analyze across contradictory evidence? How do they engage
triangulation? Does the inclusion of more and more distinct kinds of evidence
and wider and wider circles of researchers/participants help us create a coher-
ent/recognizable narrative or does this delicious proliferation of empirical
material and participants render research writing a bit more complex?
Taken by the bait of diverse forms of evidence and varied analytic strate-
gies, I yearned, therefore, for more information about the speed bumps
(Weis & Fine, 2000); that is, the theoretical, methodological, and ethical
struggles of researchers sitting with contradictory data and perspectives.
These speed bumps are typically tucked away in the diaries of researchers
or surface in quiet conversations among collaborators. Qualitative work,
however, is messy, like counseling. It would be wonderful to gather insight
from counseling psychologists about how they “make sense” of the mess of
this very human enterprise—psychological research. Perhaps in the next
volume on qualitative methods, these researchers could illuminate how they
analyze through contradictions and difference.

THEORIZING RESEARCHERS’ SUBJECTIVITIES

AS EMPIRICAL MATERIAL

Assuming the research process to be dialectical, relational, and pro-

foundly human, the contributors reflect well on how to analyze complex
psychological material gathered not only from participants, but also along
both shores of the researcher–participant river. Harboring no fantasy of
complete researcher detachment or neutrality, they cautiously and cre-
atively navigate through the precarious intersubjective space of social
research. Innovative analytic strategies are elaborated for becoming aware
of, and then analyzing, researchers’ subjectivities: thoughts, feelings, per-
spectives, desires, and repulsions (see Cook, 1994, for an early parallel
analysis of counselors’ racial subjectivities as they affect the counseling
relationship).

Becoming Aware

Across articles, there is a shared recognition that researchers are multi-

ply positioned with complicated feelings about, reactions to, and influences
on counseling psychologists’ studies. In teaching qualitative methods,
Poulin (2007 [this issue]) takes up this challenge and invites her students to
 Fine / EXPANDING THE METHODOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 465

try out and reflect on how their multiple selves affect the research:
“Students from the helping professions often benefited from . . . differenti-
ating the roles of helper and interpretive researcher, since both use the
self as an instrument of data collection and interpretation” (p. 454). Poulin
models two interview techniques with an actor who portrays a person with
depression: the first interview is conducted as a clinical intake and the sec-
ond as interpretive research. With no desire for students to “excuse” them-
selves phenomenologically or emotionally from the research interaction,
Poulin instead wants her students to understand that they have important
existential and methodological choices about how to be present in a
research interview. As I read Poulin’s intriguing article on the teaching of
qualitative methods, I was also reading a new article by Sands and Krumer-
Nevo (2006) on the “shocks” administered by research participants in inter-
views with researchers and the varied “shock waves” through which
researchers respond. So I was left with a thought. As Poulin carefully
invites her students to self-consciously consider how they will present, and
will be present, in the research interview, these transactional shocks will
undoubtedly be activated and can take even an experienced qualitative
researcher by surprise. That is, qualitative interviewing is built on a firm
foundation of unpredictability; what Kidder and Fine (1997) called “leav-
ing all pores open.” Researchers, even well-prepared and experienced
ones, often find themselves as vulnerable and jolted as their participants. It
may be as important to consider, then, how researchers shape the inter-
view/observations/ethnographies as it is to consider how they are reshaped
in the process.

Analysis of Researcher Subjectivities

Like Poulin (2007), Ponterotto and Grieger (2007) offer a menu of

strategies that help researchers think about how to catalogue researcher
subjectivities as a database, ranging from “bracketing” one’s own perspec-
tives to keeping a self-reflective journal. Suzuki et al. (2007) elaborate on
the journal as a site where a researcher can note her or his “ideas, fears,
mistakes, confusions, breakthroughs, and problems” as well as “chronicle
metanotes about the research process.” Once the material of researcher sub-
jectivities is rendered visible, they suggest varied processes for analysis.
Yeh and Inman (2007 [this issue]) model a series of phases—epoches
(drawing from Wertz, 2005)—whereby researchers first read the empirical
material while trying to “suspend” their initial judgments; next, they self-
consciously frame the material from the situated perspective of participants,
and only then may they weave their own subjectivities into the interpretive
process.
466 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / May 2007

These steps are elaborated when working with a research team, where
more layers of subjectivity checks are introduced. For instance, when work-
ing with a participatory action research team studying culture, trauma, and
coping, Yeh and Inman (2007) ask all members to prewrite their metatheo-
retical assumptions as well as their personal, cultural, and professional
attachments to reference and identity groups. After discussing and analyz-
ing these preconceptions collectively, they begin data analysis. After codes
have been generated, they invite a set of external “auditors” to review the
data and offer additional codings for the material.
In all of these analytic frameworks, positionality and researcher subjec-
tivities are recognized as essential components of the database, with rich
and rigorous interpretive possibilities imported from varied communities.
However, it is not always clear how these researchers deal with unavoidable
and important differences, conflicts, and significant dissensions that
inevitably emerge within these rippling layers of researchers/reviewers.
With the invitation for a widening base of researchers, differences of inter-
pretation, critique, and vulnerabilities undoubtedly erupt (for a close
consideration of these negotiations in a participatory research project in a
women’s prison, see Fine, Torre, Boudin, Bowen, Clark, Hylton, et al., 2001,
2003). How these differences, both healthy and troubling, are resolved or
allowed to flourish is critical to qualitative analysis. Interpretative strate-
gies, particularly participatory practices, are filled with complexity, differ-
ences, conflict, and the engaged delights of democracy. It would be most
helpful, next round, to hear how counseling psychologists work through
these dynamics.

JUMPING SCALE:
THEORIZING ACROSS LEVELS OF ANALYSIS

When Creswell et al. (2007) wrote “the unit of analysis of the qualitative
inquiry also differs from the smallest unit (an individual in a narrative study)
to the largest unit (an entire community in [participatory action research])”
(p. 259), they lay bare the multiple levels of analysis attended to in qualita-
tive work. There is a powerful current running through these articles, a kind
of insider knowledge that helps psychologists theorize across levels of
analysis. The writers know that inside the body (of researchers and partici-
pants) and through its porous membranes seep vestiges of the past, present,
and future: ancestors, unclaimed losses from prior generations, social con-
text, family, community, school, media, global politics, and anticipation of
the future. While the individual “self” may be the primary unit of data col-
lection in many of these studies, the reader also learns that the individual
 Fine / EXPANDING THE METHODOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 467

need not be the only unit of data analysis and interpretation. Politics, history,
and culture can be read just under the skin in everyone’s narrative and exca-
vated from the collective unconscious (Pruitt, 2004).
I was reminded of a familiar scene from Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White
Masks (1967):

“Look, a Negro!” I came into the world imbued with the will to find a mean-
ing in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the
world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.
Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their
attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into non-
being, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by
taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other
side, I stumbled and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other
fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I
was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart.
Now the fragments have been put together again by another self. (p. 109)

In this small segment, Fanon tells about the life of an individual, a

chance encounter, a seemingly benign communication between a child and
a stranger. However, at the same time, the reader learns about the symbolic
violence of racism, colonization, decolonization, and the mind. Many lev-
els of analysis are present in this one scene.
The experience of “crushing objecthood,” to use Fanon’s language, is
narrated by an individual who feels alone and isolated. However, Fanon’s
analysis demands that readers understand this gripping psychological
dynamic of colonialism that severs the globe, state politics, institutional rela-
tions—a strange child’s words and ultimately the soul of a man (Schenker
& Ouellette, 2000).
Perhaps better than most, counseling psychologists are trained to think
through the complex threads that cut across individual lives and multiple,
more macro levels of analysis. Counseling psychologists know that
although they may witness/talk with a person as he or she moves through
the world, that individual life carries, enacts, and transforms history, con-
text, culture, and agency. Given this deep recognition within counseling
psychology, it may be important to push the work theoretically and
methodologically to consider how they can study with precision the ways
in which these varied levels nestle inside individuals and groups; how
racism and global economics seep beneath, and are resisted, under the
skin; how the “war on terror” penetrates immigrant lives and communities;
and how individuals and groups both internalize and contest these larger
oppressive forces. Indeed, the work of qualitative counseling psychology
may, at this moment in history, be most radically vibrant as an analytic
strategy for making visible the circulatory systems of oppression and
468 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / May 2007

resistance that connect lives, contexts, and larger political formations. As

the ideology of individualism drips into every day consciousness, coun-
seling psychologists are particularly well suited to reveal how intimately
lives are woven into local and global contexts: how some survive, always
vulnerable to tilts of power and injustice, and how others flourish above
the heat of oppression.
The most extreme claim I will make in this article sits at the furthest
reach of this question of levels of analysis. I want to raise an issue long
neglected by psychology, theorizing the outlier, which has been long
ignored or viewed as if beyond the horizon of human relationships. In
social psychology, the outlier has typically been dumped in the statistical
trash bin, treated as “noise.” In developmental psychology, he or she may
be the one considered “delayed.” In clinical or counseling psychology, the
outlier holds the space of pathology, sickness, the other, the noncompliant.
In the TCP articles, the outlier appears like a shadow but not a presence in
her or his own right. Calls for adequate discrepant case analysis invite
researchers to identify what are considered disconfirming pieces of evi-
dence, compare them to the normative data, and then explore the phenom-
enon under more rigorous review of these two poles. However, I am
concerned that the conceptual potential of the outlier has been ignored in
our discipline and in this volume. I want to suggest that we convert our view
of the outlier as an individual and view her or him, again, as a lens through
which multiple levels of social relations can be seen.
Consider, for instance, how literary critic Brenda Wineapple (1999) wrote
about Hester Prynne, the social outcast featured in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter. In a preface to the 1999 edition of the classic, Wineapple
suggests that the A imprinted on Hester’s chest may signify not only
(Hester’s) Adultery but (the hypocrisy of) America, recognizing the iconic A
as it floats across levels of analysis, enabling readers to witness shame as it
attaches to individual characters and to a collective society of hypocrisy.
Rather than presume that the outlier represents the outer margin or the
case against which theory should be tested, what if the outlier is considered
to be a container or voice that has been repudiated; the embodiment of
those parts of the social that are at once fundamental and banished? What
if we were to theorize the outlier as social critic, a fractured mirror of “nor-
malcy,” or a haunting witness to structural injustice and thereby filled with
counterhegemonic knowledge?
In an essay called The Stories We Tell (Hall & Fine, 2005), both Hall and
I analyzed the life stories of two amazing African American lesbians, aged
73 and 85. Refusing to situate them as outside of the nation’s history, we
chose instead to analyze their biographies as evidence of an untold history
 Fine / EXPANDING THE METHODOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 469

of our nation. Hall and Fine wrote about their lives as a narrated tour of
twentieth-century U.S. racial and sexual history (told from the “other side”
of history), revealing how intimately heteronormativity, White/light privi-
lege, sexism, poverty, wealth, homophobia, and radical social movements
shaped their lives—and how they resisted. The authors relied on Clara
Mayo’s theoretical construct “radical marginality,” situating these women
as transgressive narrators and actors, critiquing, commenting on, and sub-
verting power arrangements of race, gender, and sexuality across a com-
bined century and a half. Like these two women, persons presumed to be
outliers are waiting to be theoretically reclaimed by psychological research.
In their narratives, the authors can critically problematize what passes as
normative. Outliers offer a prism through which counseling psychologists
can see, in a life, the complex workings of history, structures, ideologies,
and social practices of inclusion and exile.

REFLECTIONS ON WRITING

Finally, I turn to what these authors have to say about writing. The wis-
dom proffered is wide as it is extensive, ranging from Ponterotto and
Grieger’s (2007) wonderfully comprehensive and detailed framework for
writing a qualitative psychology article (that has a chance of publication)
to Haverkamp and Young’s (2007) encouragement to conceptualize
“research as a conversation” with existent literatures and quantitative stud-
ies. The insights on writing range from the micropractices of linguistic trans-
lations to large questions about assessing the validity and trustworthiness of
qualitative data.
To begin with the micro, Yeh and Inman (2007) elevate linguistic trans-
lation from a merely technical task to one that is theoretically sophisticated:

Teams of bilingual translators meet and discuss each term, concept, scale
item . . . agree on the best possible translation in terms of semantics and con-
struct validity. These translations are then scrutinized . . . by a separate group
of bilingual translators and back translated from Chinese into English . . . a
final team reviews the[se] . . . translation[s to] reach consensus on the best
possible interpretations based on cultural norms and practices. Finally, our
use of ethnography, PAR [participatory action research], and grounded the-
ory has provided an avenue for new cultural meanings to emerge that include
but are not limited to spoken language (p. 382).

In the hands of these authors, translation becomes a scholarly project of

cultural and theoretical significance that can dignify, complicate, or poten-
tially violate the research relationship.
470 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / May 2007

The articles also begin to address questions of epistemological transla-

tion, the standards by which psychologists should assess the validity and
trustworthiness of qualitative research. Seeking to create a metric to bridge
traditional and critical notions of validity/trustworthiness, data triangu-
lation, member checks, cross analysis, and repeated comparisons, these
authors trouble abstract standards of validity achieved only at a distance.
They advance instead an expanded and complexified framework for valid-
ity and trustworthiness, calling for “consequential validity” and “transgres-
sive validity” as scientific measures of “the extent [to which] research
functions as a catalyst for social and political action” (Yeh & Inman, 2007,
p. 388).
In this zone of epistemological debate, readers hear, as Anzaldua (1987)
forewarned, about those who wish to create a new world of methodological
possibilities and promise and those who wish to connect with what came
before. Some contributors to this volume sound a compelling call for
research launched in a human rights framework, in deep collaboration with
activists. Others advocate building bridges between the quantitative and
qualitative traditions, postpositivism, and interpretive psychology.
Despite the differences, all of us realize that wading across the river of
counseling psychology and qualitative methods requires new ways to think
about and hold ourselves accountable to reconstituted formulations of epis-
temology, method, design, and purpose. That is, these articles make clear
that we are situated today in a disciplinary interval moment; the grounds for
theory, method, practice, and purpose are shifting significantly. This vol-
ume offers transitional objects and constructs—sturdy walking sticks—to
keep us steady as we walk across new terrain.

CONCLUSION

From his deathbed in July 2006, George Albee dictated (but never deliv-
ered) his August Presidential Address for Division I, Society for General
Psychology, “Is it time for the Third Force in American Psychology?” With
his last breath, Albee lamented the medicalizing of social and psycho-
logical problems and called for an overtly political psychology for social
justice.

Writing prescriptions for “drugs for the mind” will cement us into a system
from which there is no escape. . . . Left wandering in the desert are those psy-
chologists dedicated to human welfare: those favoring research-based efforts
to eliminate social injustice, the social inequalities of gender, class, ethnic
identity, sexual identification, and age—all those aspiring to building a more
equitable social world.
 Fine / EXPANDING THE METHODOLOGICAL IMAGINATION 471

The authors in this volume of The Counseling Psychologist are just the
kind of psychologists Albee imagined would help lead us on our trek across
the desert. Like a Lonely Planet travel book, they have crafted a volume to
be read, discussed, dog-eared, fought with, reinterpreted, revised, and
extended. I offer one parting thought on how to move the conversation into
the future—how to tackle a rather fundamental fault line in the arguments
posed here. The tension concerns how we theorize ideology in qualitative
psychological research: the authors’ desire for research oriented toward
social justice, on the one hand, and their simultaneous and honorable desire
to represent people and communities in ways that are fair, just, and recog-
nizable on the other hand. So I roll out a difficult challenge, one I have yet
to resolve in my own work.
We live at a time and in a country in which the state and media routinely
drip-feed ideologies that justify imperialism abroad and naturalize domes-
tic inequities caused by class/race oppression. Schools now train young
people for high-stakes examinations, privileging memorization, and “right”
answers over critical thinking, dissent, and inquiry. In such a context, when
psychologists ask people to assess their experiences, expectations, identi-
ties, and desires, or to rate them on a scale, or when we observe their pub-
lic behaviors, we cannot assume the material gathered is “free” from the
insidious effects of dominant ideologies. Instead, the data with which we
work, regardless of how they are constructed and collected, cannot be pre-
sumed raw, uncontaminated, innocent, or authentic.
The epistemological problem lies in the simultaneous desire of critical
qualitative researchers to take seriously what people tell us and to advance
notions that challenge these hegemonic beliefs. The question that falls into
our political laps asks, “Do research psychologists have a right—maybe
even a responsibility—to interrogate and document inequitable social
conditions and collateral psychological damage in ways that may not be
compatible with how everyday people narrate their own lives and commu-
nities?” Crudely, once we gather their words, are we tithed to participants’
interpretations? More specifically, how do we work respectfully with com-
munities in struggle and in privilege while theorizing critically their narra-
tives of denial (“I deserve to be beaten, I haven’t been a good wife”),
internalized oppression (“I want to convert to heterosexuality”), justifica-
tions of privilege (“I’m entitled to the best”), and the psychological grasp
of colonization (“Maybe our children aren’t as smart as theirs” or “All the
tests prove, sadly, that our children are just smarter”)? Can we produce
work that challenges the very “commonsense” frameworks that may facili-
tate everyday coping—beliefs that get us all through the day—but ulti-
mately reproduce oppressive arrangements? Reflecting on Morrow’s
(2007) opening question—how do we design our work so that “a central
472 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / May 2007

criterion by which we evaluate the research endeavor would be the extent

to which it contributes to liberation”?—I find some help in Haverkamp and
Young’s (2007) belief that “qualitative research is characterized by the
awareness that the researcher . . . is an interpreter rather than a reporter . . .
not concerned with accuracy but with the emergence of a new, dialectical
understanding of the phenomenon in question” (pp. 277-278). These “new
dialectical understandings” may or may not confirm wholly individual or
community views of self, but must be at the contested theoretical core of
qualitative inquiry in psychology. Academic psychologists enjoy a privilege
of status, class, and often tenure. We therefore bear responsibility to theo-
rize that which may not be spoken by those most vulnerable or, for differ-
ent reasons, by those most privileged.
This TCP volume is a bold call for intellectual and political action—a
map for collaborating responsibly, rigorously and respectfully, and for the-
orizing in ways that prick the public conscience to provoke a new sense of
what’s not yet (Greene, 1997) Returning to Anzaldua (1987), “The possi-
bilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.” These articles,
individually and as a set, mark a significant advancement toward a very dif-
ferent tomorrow rising in counseling psychology, through qualitative meth-
ods, for social justice.

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