The American Psychological Association Publications and Communications Board Working Group on Journal Article Reporting Standards for Qualitative Research (JARS–Qual Working Group) was charged with examining the state of journal article reporting standards as they applied to qualitative research and with generating recommendations for standards that would be appropriate for a wide range of methods within the discipline of psychology. These standards describe what should be included in a research report to enable and facilitate the review process. This publication marks a historical moment—the first inclusion of qualitative research in APA Style, which is the basis of both the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2010) and APA Style CENTRAL, an online program to support APA Style. In addition to the general JARS–Qual guidelines, the Working Group has developed standards for both qualitative meta-analysis and mixed methods research. The reporting standards were developed for psychological qualitative research but may hold utility for a broad range of social sciences. They honor a range of qualitative traditions, methods, and reporting styles. The Working Group was composed of a group of researchers with backgrounds in varying methods, research topics, and approaches to inquiry. In this article, they present these standards and their rationale, and they detail the ways that the standards differ from the quantitative research reporting standards. They describe how the standards can be used by authors in the process of writing qualitative research for submission as well as by reviewers and editors in the process of reviewing research.

The current paper presents recommendations from the Task Force on Resources for the Publication of Qualitative Research of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology, a section of Division 5 of the American Psychological Association. This initiative was a response to concerns by authors that reviews of qualitative research articles frequently utilize inflexible sets of procedures and provide contradictory feedback when evaluating acceptability. In response, the Task Force proposes the concept of methodological integrity and recommends its evaluation via its two composite processes: (a) fidelity to the subject matter, which is the process by which researchers develop and maintain allegiance to the phenomenon under study as it is conceived within their tradition of inquiry, and (b) utility in achieving research goals, which is the process by which researchers select procedures to generate insightful findings that usefully answer their research questions. Questions that guide the evaluation of these processes, example principles, and a flowchart are provided to help authors and reviewers in the process of both research design and review. The consideration of methodological integrity examines whether the implementation of fidelity and utility function coherently together. Researchers and reviewers also examine whether methods further the research goals, are consistent with researchers' approaches to inquiry, and are tailored to the characteristics of the subject matter and investigators. This approach to evaluation encourages researchers and reviewers to shift from using standardized and decontextualized procedures as criteria for rigor toward assessing the underlying methodological bases for trustworthiness as they function within research projects.

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This article argues that psychotherapy practitioners and researchers should be informed by the substantive body of qualitative evidence that has been gathered to represent clients' own experiences of therapy. The current meta-analysis examined qualitative research studies analyzing clients' experiences within adult individual psychotherapy that appeared in English-language journals. This omnibus review integrates research from across psychotherapy approaches and qualitative methods, focusing on the cross-cutting question of how clients experience therapy. It utilized an innovative method in which 67 studies were subjected to a grounded theory meta-analysis in order to develop a hierarchy of data and then 42 additional studies were added into this hierarchy using a content meta-analytic method-summing to 109 studies in total. Findings highlight the critical psychotherapy experiences for clients, based upon robust findings across these research studies. Process-focused principles for practice are generated that can enrich therapists' understanding of their clients in key clinical decision-making moments. Based upon these findings, an agenda is suggested in which research is directed toward heightening therapists' understanding of clients and recognizing them as agents of change within sessions, supporting the client as self-healer paradigm. This research aims to improve therapists' sensitivity to clients' experiences and thus can expand therapists' attunement and intentionality in shaping interventions in accordance with whichever theoretical orientation is in use. The article advocates for the full integration of the qualitative literature in psychotherapy research in which variables are conceptualized in reference to an understanding of clients' experiences in sessions. (PsycINFO Database Record

Clients who had completed psychotherapy were interviewed about the significant experiences and moments they recalled within their sessions. These interviews were analyzed using grounded theory, creating a hierarchy of categories that represent what clients find important in therapy. From the hermeneutic analysis of the content of these categories, a list of principles was constructed to guide the moment-to-moment process of psychotherapy practice. The authors respond to the call for qualitative outcome studies and demonstrate how qualitative psychotherapy research can lead to empirically derived principles that then can become the foundation of future research and psychotherapy integration efforts.