The hegemony of quantitative research, leaning on the positivist paradigm and the principles of randomized control trials (RCTs) and meta-analyses of RCTs, have generated great improvements in understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders. However, these methods are inherently limited by the fact that they tend to produce and promote a normative scientific knowledge.
On the opposite, inductive methods developed in qualitative studies are valuable to elicit how people interpret and act upon their illness, and to get a unique understanding impossible to obtain by other methods. Qualitative research offers a thick description of a phenomenon and attempts to document the complexity and multiplicity of its experience. The use of qualitative methods has increased substantially over the past decade in the psychiatric field. Proximity between the clinical posture in psychiatry and the posture of the researcher investigating with a qualitative design may reconcile theoretical research and day-to-day clinical observations. Moreover, qualitative research encompasses a global perspective on clinical, medical as well as socio-cultural levels, and allows embracing all the complexity of suffering and care.
This symposium will introduce different ways of doing qualitative research in adolescent care. It will focus on adolescence emerging symptoms (deliberate self-harm, suicide, and psychosis) as well as culture and migration. Presentations will aim at describing methodological aspects as well as examples of knowledge obtained in qualitative studies.