Edwin E. Gantt

The quality of qualitative research.

In general, an appreciation of the standards of qualitative research and the types of qualitative data analyses available to researchers have not kept pace with the growing presence of qualitative studies in medical science. To help rectify this problem, the authors clarify qualitative research reliability, validity, sampling, and generalizability. They also provide 3 major theoretical frameworks for data collection and analysis that investigators may consider adopting. These 3 approaches are ethnography, existential phenomenology, and grounded theory. For each, the basic steps of data collection and analysis involved are presented, along with real-life examples of how they can contribute to improving medical care. (Am J Med Qual 2008;23:389-395)

On the Nature of a Critical Methodology

This article describes an expanded view of methodology— termed a critical methodology—in the wake of criticisms of the received view of scientific method. A critical methodology would involve a deemphasis on method per se, the need for methodological innovation and the continual critical examination of the assumptions that undergird methods and other research resources. It is argued that under a critical methodology, the processes of theory construction and research would be essentially processes of argument construction, where arguments can be supported with many types of evidence. Although there is no final certainty through method under this framework, progress can result from the tension between various perspectives in context.

Intimacy and Heteronomy: On Grounding Psychology in the Ethical

The modern self, understood as individual consciousness, derives from Greek and more recent sources that have come to be called modernism. It is argued that genuine intimacy is an impossible achievement for this self, and that its ethical concern must take the form of rational moral principles. The work of Emmanuel Levinas offers an alternative perspective wherein the self derives from the presence of the face of the Other. The mode of being of the self is thus fundamentally ethical, grounded in heteronomy and ethical obligation to the Other. Intimacy, from this grounding, is the taking on of ethical obligation. If human being is fundamentally ethical in this way, psychology should reflect this unavoidably ethical nature.

Levinas, Psychotherapy, and the Ethics of Suffering:

This article argues that by adopting a medical approach to the conceptualization, diagnosis, and treatment of emotional and psychological distress, contemporary psychotherapy has robbed itself of the possibility of genuinely understanding the radically ethical nature and significance of human suffering. This article discusses both some of the original sources and assumptions that provided the impetus for the adoption of the medical model in psychotherapy and also some contemporary restatements of these original positions. In opposition to both the dualism and reductionism inherent in medical approaches to psychotherapy, this article aims at providing a more hermeneutic-phenomenological understanding of human suffering, particularly as detailed in the work of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Such an alternative approach will seek to explicate the radically ethical nature of human suffering by recognizing therapists’ fundamental responsibility to “suffer-with” and “suffer-for” their clients.

Sociobiological and Social Constructionist Accounts of Altruism: a Phenomenological Critique

Much theorizing about altruism has been undertaken within a naturalistic and deterministic sociobiological framework that has sought to explain altruistic action in terms of underlying genetic selfishness. Recently, however, social constructionist thinkers have developed an alternative to such theorizing which suggests that human action arises out of fundamentally open-ended and malleable social relationships. This paper intends to show, however, that a reductive egoism is nonetheless still at work in such accounts, typically taking the form of an underlying concern for matters of personal status and social recognition. As a response, this paper will briefly outline the work of the French phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas as an example of non-reductive and fundamentally Other-oriented alternatives to both sociobiological and social constructionist accounts of altruistic action.

Felt moral obligation and the moral judgement–moral action gap: toward a phenomenology of moral life

The step-off point for this article is the problem of the ‘moral judgement–moral action gap’ as found in contemporary literature of moral education and moral development. We argue that this gap, and the conceptual problems encountered by attempts to bridge it, reflects the effect of a different, deeper and more problematic conceptual gap: the ‘ontological’ gap between meaningful moral events and the underlying natural structures or mechanical processes presumed to produce them. We contend that the very real fact that moral reasoning does not reliably produce moral action consistent with one’s moral reasoning cannot be adequately understood or clarified by appealing to natural structures and mechanical processes. Rather, a radically holistic perspective is required. It is for this reason that we look to an alternative metaphysical grounding for moral behaviour in the work of the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas.

Psychology and the death of aspiration

This paper argues that the prevailing theories, models, and explanations of contemporary psychology, in large part because they reflect the assumptions of reductive naturalism, provide an understanding of our human being such that aspiration—to the higher, the more noble, and the more meaningful—becomes not only unreasonable, but impossible. Indeed, such thinking in the discipline marks the death of aspiration. The paper further argues, following the work of Unamuno, Levinas, and Marion, that genuine aspiration is possible and reasonable only in the context of a temporal continuity of the soul, the existence of an other to whom we are obligated, and the possibility of loving with no expectation of reciprocity. Such a context, in turn, is possible only under a particular set of assumptions about our human being that operate on the ontological level. These assumptions, which include that we are innately possessed of meaningful intelligence, that we can, in fact, anticipate temporal continuity, that we are moral agents inhabiting a moral world, and that we are capable of genuine human intimacy, are presented as an alternative starting point for a psychology which does more than toll the death of aspiration.

Egoism, Altruism, and the Ethical Foundations of Personhood

Most contemporary theorizing in psychology rejects the possibility of genuine altruism by endorsing explanations that assume psychological egoism. We seek to reframe psychological inquiry on the question of altruism by exploring an alternative, nonegoistic conceptual framework, within which genuine altruism is possible and whereby the meaning and moral dimensions of altruism can be more fruitfully explored. Two central features of our analysis are (a) the conceptual necessity of human agency for the preservation of the possibility of meaning in human affairs and (b) an examination of the ontological necessity of a genuinely social and moral understanding of personhood that preserves the possibility of altruism. Once these two issues have been addressed, an alternative conceptual framework for exploring the question of altruism drawing on the work of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is briefly presented.

Mechanisms or metaphors? The emptiness of evolutionary psychological explanations

In recent decades, numerous psychological and sociological theories have been offered in the attempt to explain human cognition, motivation, and behavior in fundamentally evolutionary terms. Drawing inspiration from the Darwinian theory of natural selection, evolutionary approaches to social science argue that behavior arises primarily from underlying evolved psychological mechanisms and that the central task of social science is to identify and articulate the specific nature of such mechanisms. Much effort has been expended by evolutionary social scientists to definitively identify the various evolved psychological mechanisms that account for the diversity of human cognitive, emotional, and social behavior. We argue, however, that the search for evolved psychological mechanisms that adequately account for either the transmission of psychological entities (i.e., emotions, intentions, ideas, behaviors, etc.) across generations or the current existence of such entities cannot in principle succeed because evolutionary social science theorists have fundamentally mistaken their metaphors for mechanisms.

Positive Psychology, Existential Psychology, and the Presumption of Egoism

Positive psychology and existential psychology are commonly thought to reflect radically different perspectives on the deep questions of human nature, what constitutes legitimate psychological inquiry, and the meaning of the good life. In this chapter, we identify and discuss three important ways in which positive psychology and existential psychology seem to differ. In particular, we examine positive psychology’s commitment to studying the conditions of happiness, its heavy reliance on traditional methods of empirical research, and its advocacy of a scientifically grounded “calculus of well-being,” whose prescriptive purpose is to actively bring about a greater measure of happiness and flourishing in people’s lives. By way of contrast, we also examine existential psychology’s notion that suffering has a central role in a life of genuine significance, its deep skepticism of the ability of traditional scientific approaches to adequately capture human subjectivity and meaning, and its rejection of any utopic vision of human flourishing that is grounded in hedonism and its ethical precepts. The main thrust of our analysis, however, is that beneath these significant conceptual and practical differences, both positive and existential psychologies share a thorough-going commitment to an egoistic depiction of human nature. That is, both approaches focus their conceptual efforts inward, looking to the self as the center of human action and relationships. In short, we argue that positive psychology and existential psychology have a crucial and often overlooked commonality at their core that is not merely a “papering-over” of essential differences, nor an attempt to superficially reconcile two radically different intellectual traditions. As such, both traditions are fundamentally inadequate for addressing human relationships in terms that do not reduce the relevance and value of others to an instrumental value to the self.