CCRI Seminar: Teaching and supervising qualitative psychotherapy research

The five of us teach qualitative approaches to psychotherapy research at the University of Edinburgh. Our department, and we, teach only qualitative research. Our department, and we, see this sole focus on qualitative research as a commitment, a commitment in line with the values and practices of counselling and psychotherapy. In the academic year just gone, between the five of us, we organised and taught four such qualitative courses, preparing over 100 students for, and supporting them in, their master’s or doctoral research projects. Many students have previously only been taught positivist, quantitative research. In this seminar we will consider the joys and challenges, delights and dilemmas, politics and possibilities, of teaching qualitative research to students, of joining with them as they and we explore what qualitative research might do. We explore, in turn, how teaching psychotherapy research opens us up to thinking, writing, knowing, living, and imagining otherwise.

The seminar presentation will draw from a chapter we have co-authored for a forthcoming book, Qualitative Research Approaches (2), edited by Keith Tudor and Jonathan Wyatt, to be published by Routledge in 2026.