The aim of this study was to assess qualitative psychology in Central-Eastern Europe. We analysed the paradigms, the methods, and the fields of 35 qualitative research articles of five countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Our findings show constructivist/interpretivist considerations seem to be dominant among the analyzed qualitative articles. In our study, postpositivist elements, such as generalization and deductive coding, also occurred. We found a substantial presence of paradigmatic eclecticism and confusion with the simultaneous usage of both constructivist/interpretivist and postpositivist considerations. According to the methodological analysis of the 35 articles, unspecified methods are used most frequently. Moreover, methodological descriptions were laconic and not detailed.
The content analysis of the keywords presented that the most commonly examined field is social psychology, which is in line with previous studies (Stainton-Rogers & Willig Citation2017). In the brief literature of qualitative research paradigms, counseling journals are analyzed by Ponterotto et al. (Citation2017) and Gehart et al. (Citation2001) because qualitative studies are the most used in the field of psychological counsellng. Our study found counseling was mentioned only once.
The seeming paradigmatic inconsistency might be rooted in the sociological and ethnographical traditions where a study is considered to be qualitative when it uses interviews or focus groups (Demuth Citation2015). As sociology and ethnography have a longer tradition in the examined countries, this might cause a mixture of considerations and less strict methodology and epistemology than mainstream qualitative psychology. In psychology the reliability and transparency of qualitative studies have become vital and rigorous. However, qualitative psychology is still looking for its own identity and formula in the global psychological discourse, which might result in ambiguity (Gürtler & Huber Citation2006). Knoblauch et al. (Citation2005) state that research questions in which qualitative methods are used might be influenced by political, economic, social, and cultural backgrounds of the researcher.
We suggest paradigms might be used in a mixed way unless the researcher uses them consistently and transparently by the description of the epistemological foundation, the methodological choices, and the process of analysis.
