Principles and practices: An empirical examination of qualitative research in the Journal of Counseling Psychology.

This article examines the 50 qualitative studies published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology (JCP) over a 15-year period in light of methodological principles advocated by qualitative theorists. The match between practices and principles is not high. In the modal investigation, coders (most of whom did not interact with or observe participants) worked from transcripts of a 60-min interview conducted in a setting convenient for the researcher. Researchers endorsed the need to bracket their own subjective experiences and used auditors to enhance reproducibility of findings. Trend analyses suggest that qualitative research in JCP has tended to drift further from qualitative principles over time. The authors consider the implications of these findings for the potential of qualitative methods to inform science and practice in counseling psychology.