Writing Up...

Just a quick post to share this article by Ron Chenail about writing up...it covers so many of the things we have been talking about recently but really puts the turbo on the creativity and number of options availalbe to us in writing up

Here The Qualitative Report, Volume 2, Number 3, December, 1995(http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR2-3/presenting.html)

Some quotes to reinforce the points:
“I write in order to learn something that I didn’t know before I wrote it…not to write until I knew what I wanted to say, until my points were organized and outlined… this static writing model coheres with mechanistic scientism and quantitative research… It ignores the role of writing as a dynamic, creative process….(Richardson L. 1990)
“Writing-up qualitative research inevitably results in the emergence of new ideas and ways of viewing the data and hence plays a crucial role in the analysis process.”(Pitchforth et al. 2005)

Shut Up and Write continues

We had a very productive first ShutUp and Write meeting this Friday with 13 people joining for 7 hours of writing....many people writing up results, a few writing research proposals, discussions and other things...we had lots of interesting chats during the breaks, comparing analysis methods, working on adding some literature to results sections but generally I think the real benefit was simply having an opportunity to write without the distractions of being at home, without access to the internet but in a collegial and supportive setting

I found it pretty amazing how much I got done, writing about half a paper, which is really saying something..plus...Toblerone, Brownies, quiche, slice, fruit and many more goodies...

We planned to more meetings;

1. October19 9am-4pm in the Conference Room in Psychology Clinic, Mackie Building

2. Novermber 30th 9am-4pm OTC 405 as before

Bring your own lap top for the October meeting, computers provided for November.....please email me to express an interest...p.rhodes@sydney.edu.au

Behind the Times

The more I read the more concerned I become about how we are lagging behind in clinical psychology in Australia when it comes to qualitative research in psychology..been reading this INTRODUCTION TO QUALITATIVE METHODS IN PSYCHOLOGY Dennis Howitt Loughborough University where he provides a history of qual in psychology, marking the 1980's as when qual became more accepted..

That is certainly not the case with clinical psychology here where we lag way behind...even in 1940 it was understood that science can include qualitative..

If we rejoice, for example, that present-day psychology is . . . increasingly
empirical, mechanistic, quantitative, nomothetic, analytic, and operational,
we should also beware of demanding slavish subservience to these presuppositions. Why not allow psychology as a science – for science is a broad and beneficent term – to be also rational, teleological, qualitative, idiographic, synoptic, and even  non-operational? I mention these antitheses of virtue with deliberation, for the simple reason that great insights of psychology 
in the past – for example, those of Aristotle, Locke, Fechner, James, Freud– have stemmed from one or more of these unfashionable presuppositions. (Allport, 1940, p. 25)

Thank god for Health Psychology and Critical Psychology who still wave the flag...