I don't mean to jack your thread, and any replies to this I request as PMs. I was thinking of seeing what works in treatment and what doesn't in a treatment outcome study. If I just asked therapists what works and what doesn't, then ask the client what works what doesn't, what kind of structured qualitative analysis can I do on that? I had looked at protocol analysis but it seems it's more for analyzing "thinking out loud" while doing a behavior as opposed to looking back retrospectively. Just was wondering what qualitative methodswould be appropriate to analyze the responses.
As far as why qualitative methods haven't worked, I'll posit my thoughts. First is that the behaviorists were all about quantitative methods, which was a good development in that you can't generalize to many people findings that were done in a single, very strange Freudian case study. However, it can be a dogmatic approach which misses info as mentioned in this thread. The field has shown an aversion to "opinion" based data in contrast to "hard" numerical data which supposedly does not involve inference. As anyone well-versed in qualitative methods can tell you, there are many inferences necessary to convert the "real" value of a construct to numerical values on a measure, and using structured methods in qualitative research can reduce the amount of inference involved in the recordings of data as well. As far as I'm aware from discussions with friends in other academic fields, qualitative research has caught on quite a bit more in other social sciences.
So, aversion to supposedly "opinion-based" data was formed as a behaviorist reaction to using single case studies and the like to make sweeping conclusions that were later judged to be unfounded. Now, we are going back to more qualitative methods, but with more structure this time, to capture information that is lost by quantitative methods, IMHO.
