The Listening Guide Method of Psychological Inquiry

I wish to take this opportunity to reflect on the Listening Guide as a qualitative research method: its distinguishing features, its history, the range of its uses, and the theoretical and methodological issues it raises. The word “method” means way, and the Listening Guide offers a way of listening that is designed to facilitate psychological discovery. By attending to voice and the interplay of voices within an interview transcript or a text, to the dynamics of the research relationship, and to the cultural setting of the research, it establishes a contextual framework for understanding or interpretation. As voice is embodied and resides in language, it grounds psychological inquiry in physical and cultural space. But voice is also a manifestation of the psyche, a way of communicating experience or bringing the inner world out into the open. The Listening Guide in its attention to voice thus provides a way of exploring the interplay of inner and outer worlds.