Observational Qualitative Psychotherapy Process Research

Abstract While the analysis of observation based data has long been a facet of qualitative research methodology, observational qualitative research methods are less well known to readers of psychotherapy process research than qualitative self-report, typically interview-based, data collection methods. The paper introduces Observational Qualitative Psychotherapy Process Research as a genre of qualitative psychotherapy process research. Brief Structured Recall, Theory Building Qualitative Case Studies, Theoretically-Informed Qualitative Case Conceptualization Studies, Task Analysis, and Conversational Analysis of Therapeutic Interventions are each introduced as distinct variants of observational qualitative psychotherapy process research and examples of the areas of research interest these variants have been applied to are discussed. Commonalities across these variants of the approach are discussed including the use of transcripts and session recordings of therapy sessions, the adaptation of flexible research strategies to investigate in-session processes, the use of an explicit theoretical framework, and the incorporation of quantitative methods to complement or triangulate qualitative strategies.