Transforming Self and Others through Research

Transpersonal Research Methods and Skills for the Human Sciences and Humanities

Rosemarie Anderson, William Braud

• Editorial: SUNY Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781438436739
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Transpersonal Psychology

Research approaches in the field of transpersonal psychology can be transformative for researchers, participants, and the audience of a project. This book offers these transformative approaches to those conducting research across the human sciences and the humanities. Rosemarie Anderson and William Braud first described such methods in Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences (1998). Since that time, in hundreds of empirical studies, these methods have been tested and integrated with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method research designs. Anderson and Braud, writing with a contribution from Jennifer Clements, invite scholars to bring multiple ways of knowing and personal resources to their scholarship. While emphasizing established research conventions for rigor, Anderson and Braud encourage researchers to plumb the depths of intuition, imagination, play, mindfulness, compassion, creativity, and embodied writing as research skills. Experiential exercises to help readers develop these skills are provided.

Introduction to Part 1

Transpersonal Research Methods

The transpersonal research methods presented in Part 1 invite transformation of self and others in all aspects of research praxis and application—from the investigator's conceptualization of a study through the consumers' appreciation of research as they read and apply findings to practical life problems. All three research approaches—namely intuitive inquiry, integral inquiry, and organic inquiry—seek to invite everyone involved in research to engage the possibility of being transformed in some way by their participation. In transpersonal research, researchers, participants, and the audience or readers of research reports often change or transform their understanding of the research topic, including self understanding in relationship to the topic. Researchers are invited to study topics about which they are passionate and likely to have experienced themselves. Researchers analyze, interpret, and present findings in ways that engage their own participation, attitudes, and life stories and prompt changes in the ways they feel and think about the topic, themselves, others, and the world. Research participants, too, are actively involved and encouraged to engage the topic in ways that enhance their life journeys and personal growth. The eventual readers and consumers of research reports and applications are also invited to integrate and apply research findings in ways that further their self understanding and the transformation of their communities. The transpersonal research approaches presented in Part 1 share these common end goals.

Intuitive inquiry, integral inquiry, and organic inquiry began their development within the field of transpersonal psychology in the mid-1990s. Rosemarie Anderson and William Braud, the developers of intuitive inquiry and integral inquiry respectively, were the principal facilitators of these emerging transpersonal approaches to research in the context of teaching research methods and supervising doctoral dissertations at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (ITP). In 1994 and 1995, a set of unexpected circumstances led to one of the most fruitful endeavors of our careers. We began teaching quantitative and qualitative research methods together. The course became a laboratory to expand and extend established research methods transpersonally. One afternoon, wanting “to set a field of intention,” we practiced what we were asking our students to do. We timed ourselves. In eight minutes, we had articulated a comprehensive list of ways in which well-established research methods, both quantitative and qualitative, could be extended or expanded to make them more applicable to the exploration of transpersonal and spiritual experiences. Around the same time, Jennifer Clements and colleagues Dorothy Ettling, Dianne Jenett, and Lisa Shields (1999) began to develop organic inquiry at ITP.

Our ongoing conversations and interactions with students and colleagues led us to coauthor Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences (Braud and Anderson 1998), in which the three approaches were presented in the theoretical way they emerged at the time. Since the mid-1990s, our three approaches have been tested and refined in a large number of empirical studies, mostly conducted by ITP graduate students who were engaged in dissertation research (see Chapters 1, 2, and 3 for descriptions of these studies). In classroom applications and research supervision, we have also learned ways to apply and broaden our approaches, making them relevant to beginning and mature researchers and professional practitioners in the human sciences. The presentations of intuitive inquiry, integral inquiry, and organic inquiry in Part 1 represent our readiness to offer the fruits of our transpersonal research practices to the wider human science research community.

Intuitive inquiry, integral inquiry, and organic inquiry are applicable to research endeavors throughout the human sciences. Many fields of scholarship and science seek to explore the potential of human transformation in our engagement with one another and the world at large. Transpersonal psychology is in no way unique in its exploration of the “farther researches of human nature” as Abraham Maslow put it so well in the 1960s. These other fields of study include economics, education, educational psychology, counseling, environmental studies, nursing science, medicine, political science, public health, and others that we cannot now envision. These three research approaches share some common features with current, fast-paced developments in qualitative research methods as well, though it is beyond the scope of this book to make these comparisons (see the appendixes in Braud and Anderson 1998 for some of these comparisons).

In our deepest self understanding, we hope that human science researchers who seek transformation for themselves and others in the practice and applications of research will incorporate our transpersonal approaches and skills, or aspects of them, in ways that further the transformative end goals of their fields of inquiry. Nothing would please us more. In no way, do we consider our approaches fixed or immutable but rather as scholarly grist for the mill in scientific discourse and discovery. Use these approaches toward positive, transformative ends so that all of us as scholars and researchers may collaborate and contribute to a better world for everything that lives.

Rationale for the Development of
Transpersonal Approaches to Research

Explicit in the early transpersonal conversations was a recognition that methods more fitting to the nature of transpersonal and spiritual phenomena would eventually have to be created, validated, and employed within the scientific community. That is, the definition of empirical must eventually be expanded to include inner experiences, which are private and therefore unobservable by an external observer. Of course, while the study of researchers' and participants' inner experience is relevant to a wide variety of topics and human experiences, inner-experience data are essential to the study of transpersonal and spiritual experiences. Our first book, Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences was the first book to explore such methods in detail.

In transpersonal research, the Renaissance view of the artist may present a more complete model for investigating human experience than that of the nineteenth century physical scientist. Evaluated candidly, the most eloquent speakers today on the human experience often seem to be poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, storytellers, and theologians—and more rarely psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and other scientists. By copying the objectivist and positivist views of the physical scientists (who are now abandoning that model themselves) and owning radical positivism and psychological behaviorism as the epistemological imprimatur, psychologists and other human scientists have ignored and even trivialized vast realms of fascinating human experiences. A well-known existential clinical psychologist, James Bugental, puts the dilemma quite succinctly: “The objectivist view of psychology … regards all that is not familiar as dangerous, mythical, or nonexistent” (Valle and Halling 1989, ix). Even when investigating extraordinary human experiences, researchers often seem content with meaning-diminishing methodologies. Without supporting methodologies, rich topics such as the study of passion, making love, giving birth, grieving, ecstasy, quietude, and mystical experiences are too often neglected. So often our research methods fall flat before the fullness and extraordinary experience of being human day-to-day. Having ceded the exploration of the expansive nature of being human to others by default, it may be time to re-enchant our methods of inquiry and related epistemologies with the rigors and vigor of imagination and more fully dimensionalized concepts and theories. Instead of tightening controls, we propose the rigors of full disclosure and complexity.

The paradigms of science are shifting. The stage is set for change. To quote Adrienne Rich (1979), we must get beyond the “assumptions in which we are drenched” (35). Along with the theories and critiques proposed by transpersonal psychologists and scientists in related fields, other developments and critiques have loosened the exclusive hold on psychological research that the experimental method once enjoyed. Some of these alternative views stem from the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, feminist critique and theory, existential-phenomenological theory and phenomenological methods, deconstructionism and the post-modern critique of culture, the epistemological insights of quantum and high-energy physics, parapsychological investigations, narrative methods and discourse analysis, in-depth case studies, heuristic methods, and the concerns about external and effectual validity taking place within experimental psychology. There has been a series of critiques within psychology itself, notably from Bruner (1990), in reconceptualizing cognitive psychology as folk psychology, and from recent developments in the human sciences in general. Once thought of as unassailable epistemologies, behaviorism and some aspects of cognitive science have been besieged by still more complete and farreaching ideas and methodologies. In wave upon wave, these critiques have enlivened scientific discourse as academic disciplines once again search for more suitable epistemologies and methods of inquiry.

Along with these transpersonal research approaches, of course, conventional qualitative and quantitative methods also may be employed—depending on how well they, or a mix of methods, suit the topic of inquiry. By presenting these transpersonal approaches to research, we hope to enliven scholarly and scientific inquiry in many fields with transpersonal approaches to investigating the nature and potential of human experience and—more generally, to support renewed imagination, creativity, and wonder/wonderment throughout all scientific inquiry and discourse.

Overview of Intuitive Inquiry, Integral Inquiry,
and Organic Inquiry

Intuitive inquiry, integral inquiry, and organic inquiry share many of the same common values and end goals regarding the importance of the transformation of the researcher and others. Because the three approaches were developed within transpersonal psychology, the approaches also share values and end goals widely held within the field of transpersonal psychology and related fields. A description and a history of transpersonal psychology are provided below to help orient readers to this movement within psychology and the human sciences in general. All three of these transformative approaches emphasize complementary or multiple ways of knowing, usually known in scholarly literature as “multiple intelligences.” All three also emphasize the evolving and organic quality inherent to all good research; the researcher's willingness and preparation to engage research activities wholeheartedly and personally; the appropriateness of the approaches to the study of experientially-based topics; and an unequivocal invitation for researchers, participants, and eventual readers of research reports to have a rollicking good time while participating in research.

The ways in which the three approaches differ tends to reflect the theoretical traditions emphasized or the scope of the method. For example, intuitive inquiry has been influenced primarily by traditions of European hermeneutics (interpretation), and organic inquiry was influenced by Carl Jung's concepts of the transcendent function and the four typological functions of thinking, feeling, intuition, and sensation. Integral inquiry differs from both intuitive inquiry and organic inquiry in its comprehensive integration of quantitative and qualitative data collection, analysis, and interpretation, and its presentation of findings in ways aligned with mixed-method approaches to research (Creswell 2009; Creswell and Clark 2006; Tashakkori and Teddlie 1998; Tashakkori and Teddlie 2003) developed in the last decade. Intuitive inquiry and organic inquiry emphasize qualitative data collection and analysis. That said, the differences become much more obvious in the doing of these approaches, because the different traditions emphasized and the scope of the methods invite distinctive processes more easily felt than conceptualized.

Intuitive Inquiry

Intuitive inquiry invites intuitive processes and insights directly into research practice—in the formulation of a research topic or question; the reflection on pertinent theoretical and empirical literature; data collection, analysis, and interpretation; and the presentation of findings. Based on the classic hermeneutical understanding that interpretation is personal and cyclical rather than linear and procedural, the approach provides a series of cycles that carry the research process forward. Throughout intuitive inquiry, compassion toward self and others is considered central to understanding.

Integral Inquiry

Integral inquiry provides both a comprehensive overview of psychological research methods and a means to blend these methods and to apply them to a particular research topic. Affirming the view that human experience is multileveled and complex, integral inquiry is multifaceted and pluralistic. A key feature of the approach is the presentation of a continuum of qualitative and quantitative methods, both conventional and avant-garde, from which researchers may choose or mix approaches to best suit their research questions. An inclusive approach to research is fostered by encouraging the integral inquirer to address four types of research questions—what is the nature of an experience, how has the experience been conceptualized through h...