UCL - La recherche qualitative en psychologie clinique : méthodologie et intégration de méthodes

[PSYM2211]

[60h] 6 credits

This course is taught in the 1st semester.

Teacher(s): Jean-Luc Brackelaire, Jean Kinable

Language: French

Level: Second

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods
Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Aims

- To acquire the basis of qualitative methods in social sciences by the identification of the characteristics of their aiming, their typologies and procedures of investigation, and also to locate their relevance according to the fields and the questions of research suitable for contemporary clinical psychology.
- To differentiate, compare and combine various methods of research in clinical psychology, coming from discipline and close disciplines
- To measure the interest of the recourse to several methods and their possible integration
- To build, on this basis, suitable research devices combining these methods.

Main themes

- To compare History of qualitative methods in social sciences and clinical psychology. Epistemological access of these methods and their objects of investigation: productions of individual and groups subjectivity.
Presentation of major typologies and their instrumentation: participating observation, understanding interview, projective productions, content analysis of narrations, accounts of life, etc.
Qualitative techniques of data analysis, their interpretation and communication: stakes and prospects.
- By their differentiation and their confrontation, to highlight with precision the specific contributions of each method (and by which mechanisms), its possible limits, and its articulations with others, in the meaning of the complementarity, the reciprocal validation, the revival of one by the other, etc
- To open these problems with interdisciplinary collaboration integrating today in clinical psychology issued methods i.a. from ethnology, sociology, linguistics, psychiatry, criminology.
- To measure the method or the integration of methods most suitable/revealing for each object and situation of research, and according to the stage of research.
- To continue the interrogation on the theories of reference of each method, its technicality, its system of interpretation.
- To evaluate the range of the reasoning on devices of research already carried out, but also to work out relevant devices for research in sight.

Content and teaching methods

In regards to the method, the course will be animated by two teachers specialized in different procedures of research in qualitative data. It will begin with the analysis of concrete examples of research in clinical psychology, implying one work of reading by the students, whose participation in the common reflexion will be largely requested.
For the contents:
- one will differentiate, compare and combine various methods of research in clinical psychology and in close disciplines (interview, abstract, research based on a clinical practice, projective methods, biographical or family accounts, artistic and cultural mediations, participating observation, structural analysis of contents, narration, etc).
- one will evaluate, through examples of research, the interest of the recourse to the triangulation of several methods and their integration in function of the object of research and the issues of the studied cases, the specificities of the respective contributions of the methods, the possible combinations, the relationship between the theory and the clinical engaged by these methods and the research.
- one will evaluate and build, on this basis, the devices of research combining these methods.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Pre-required courses: courses of first the first master and at least a course on a projective method.
Evaluation: the examination is oral or written, according to the teachers
Support: Detailed plan, bibliography, file of selected texts