This article articulates principles and practices that support methodological integrity in relation to critical qualitative research. We begin by describing 2 changes that have occurred in psychological methods over the last 15 years. (a) Building on foundational work advocating for epistemological pluralism, guidelines on how to design, review, and report qualitative and mixed methods have been advanced to support methodological integrity in keeping with a diversity of researchers’ aims and approaches. (b) There has been an increased use of critical epistemological perspectives and critical methods. In light of these changes, the current article puts forward principles to support critical qualitative researchers when considering methodological rigor and when formulating rationales to support their methods in the journal article review process. Illustrating the principles with an example of critical research, the article describes common problems and issues in the research design process that can be considered in order to strengthen the returns of critical studies. Recommendations are made for editors and reviewers on how to conduct reviews of critical qualitative research, and pressing concerns for publishing critical qualitative research are detailed.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth technologies and mental health apps have been promoted to manage distress in the public and to augment existing mental health services. From a humanistic perspective, the promotion and use of mobile apps raises ethical concerns regarding the autonomy of the person using the app. However, there are other dangers that arise when technological fixes are embraced at a time of crisis. Naomi Klein and Shoshanna Zuboff have recently warned about disaster and surveillance capitalism—using crises to pass legislation that will benefit the rich and deepen inequality, and using anonymized behavioral data for commercial purposes. This analysis reveals that mental health apps may take individuals at their most vulnerable and make them part of a hidden supply chain for the marketplace. We provide a case study of a mental health app that uses digital phenotyping to predict negative mood states. We describe the logic of digital phenotyping and assess the efficacy data on which claims of its validity are based. Drawing from the frameworks of disaster and surveillance capitalism, we also use a humanistic psychology lens to identify the ethical entanglements and the unintended consequences of promoting and using this technology during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are a number of procedures, well established within qualitative research, that were originally formulated to use intersubjective confirmation as a way to bolster confidence in findings (e.g., consensus, auditing, member checks). These procedures enhanced methodological integrity by demonstrating that people from differing perspectives can examine the data and reach the same conclusions-indicating that a finding was not entirely idiosyncratic. In this article, we propose the concept of epistemic privilege as an alternate foundation for these procedures. In this approach, the recognition of differences among the histories, perspectives, knowledge, and investments of research team members creates a context in which forms of subjective knowledge (i.e., lived experience, expertise) become resources that heighten a team's perspicacity. The enactment of the proposed procedures shifts the meanings and application of confirmation processes so they become appropriate for critical, constructivist, and participatory research. They change the theoretical formulation from a democratic process of confirming objective perceptions to a collaborative process of intersubjective recognition that values diverse knowledge sources. We focus on the example of researcher consensus, providing a brief history of past rationales and practices for this procedure, and describing our approach as strengthening findings as well as improving research team dynamics. This form of collaboration ameliorates prior concerns expressed about consensus, such as intergroup power differentials, and the fear that attuned investigators may weaken their interpretations to obtain consensus with others. In this process, we identify sources of epistemic privilege, detail methodological procedures, and offer suggestions for research reporting.

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There is research evidence, from both qualitative and quantitative studies, that silences in psychotherapy have established associations with good and poor outcomes that include and extend beyond symptom measures to processes such as insight, symbolization, and disengagement. Research also has demonstrated that therapists attend to clients’ silences, seeking to comprehend the processes therein and intentionally support productive silent processes. This chapter synthesizes this research and examines features of silence processes to provide psychotherapists with the skills to differentiate the functions of both productive and obstructive forms of pausing. It includes a review of 33 quantitative and qualitative studies on silences in individual psychotherapy (from 309 clients and 209 therapists). Our qualitative and integrative meta-analytic evidence indicated that it enhanced their ability to intervene responsively and enhance therapy outcomes when psychotherapists’ responded strategically to the specific functions of silences. We consider research limitations, training implications, and therapeutic practices based on the research evidence.