Course content

The course offers students a comprehensive introduction to various advanced approaches and techniques used to understand human behavior, thought, and experience through a qualitative perspective.

The course begins with an exploration of Interview Research, guiding students in designing, conducting, transcribing, and analyzing in-depth interviews.

This module emphasizes practical skills in gathering qualitative data, fostering critical awareness of how researcher perspectives and participant responses shape the research findings.

Through hands-on experience, students will develop a foundation in interviewing techniques and in organizing and interpreting textual data with analytical rigor.

Narrative Analysis and Conversation Analysis constitute the next key components of the course.

In the narrative analysis section, students will learn to examine how individuals construct stories to make sense of their personal experiences and identity.

By focusing on structure, content, and the context of narratives, students will gain insight into the meanings people attribute to life events.

The conversation analysis module introduces methods for studying naturally occurring interactions, where students analyze the structure and function of dialogue in real-time settings.

It emphasizes the subtle dynamics of social interaction, helping students identify patterns in turn-taking, pauses, and other linguistic cues that reveal social and psychological processes.

In the final part of the course, students will engage with Cognitive Ethnography to examine how cognition is distributed across individuals, artifacts, and environments.

This approach emphasizes the study of people’s everyday practices within their natural contexts, allowing students to analyze how thinking, learning, and decision-making occur in real-world settings.

The course ends in a group project that integrates skills learned across all modules, where students conduct a research study and present their findings to the class.

Learning outcome

Knowledge

The student:

• has acquired advanced knowledge and a specialized insight into qualitative research strategies
• has in-depth knowledge of the scientific theoretical justifications for the qualitative methods
• knows about the professional implications of the application of qualitative methods and can argue for their possible relevance in solving current societal issues.

Skills

The student:

• can apply qualitative methods in a justified way within current investigations in psychology
• can independently and critically analyze and take a decision on how a qualitative research design should be worked out
• can make an effective choice of research method based on, and adapted to the research question.
• can analyze and understand new qualitative methods and evaluate their advantages in a critical and independent way
• can independently assess the research ethics implications of the actual method used for those involved, but also when it comes to their own research ethics compliance.

General competence

The student:

• has built up a general competence to think fundamentally and logically about questions related to qualitative methods
• has developed an ability to apply systematic interpretation strategies
• can analyze relevant subject, professional and research ethical issues related to qualitative methods
• can apply the knowledge and skills in qualitative methods to advanced tasks and projects
• can communicate their work, and master the subject's forms of expression in an understandable way
• can broadly communicate the most central aspects of the academic issues, analyzes and conclusions
• can contribute to new thinking in the use of qualitative methods and thus be active in innovation processes.

Learning methods and activities

Lectures

Compulsory assignments

• group project
• Oral presentation of group project

Specific conditions

Recommended previous knowledge

Basic understanding of data collection methods and one or more research strategies within qualitative research.

Required previous knowledge

Admission to a programme of study is required:

Clinical Psychology Programme, 6 years (CPSY6)

Psychology (MPSY)

Credit reductions