This issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy is dedicated to qualitative research. The qualitative research paradigm has become increasingly common and widely accepted during the last decade in occupational therapy research as well as in the healthcare sciences and medicine. The research performed within this paradigm is often said to have its base in the hermeneutic tradition of science, with the intention of the research being to provide a contextualized and profound understanding of humans’ experiences and actions. As qualitative research methods have been developed and refined in a variety of fields over recent years, the methodological diversity has also developed. Today, there are many different practices that can be adopted within the qualitative paradigm, which will be obvious in this special issue.
In 1998, the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy published its first special issue on qualitative research. Today, eight years later, it is exciting to notice some interesting differences between the two issues. The most obvious difference is that while the 1998 issue encompassed empirical studies alone, this one contains more publications elaborating on methodological, philosophical, and theoretical issues of qualitative research than on empirical studies. Another difference is that the present issue covers a much broader spectrum of methodological approaches within the domain of qualitative research than did the 1998 issue. These differences can be understood as timely examples of the rapid development that has occurred within the science of occupational therapy. The papers included in this issue present remarkably up-to-date topics, such as the concept of participation in the ICF, the philosophical underpinning and potentials of different approaches taken in research, the impact of technology on the occupational lives of hospitalized people, and the refinement of different approaches to enable human experiences to be accessed, on a one-to-one basis and in groups. The scholarly and methodological development that is exemplified in this issue indicates that occupational therapy researchers are better equipped today than they have ever been to explore their clients’ life-world experiences, which will make them better able to contribute to our specific body of knowledge as well as to the larger scientific community. Moreover, it shows that the knowledge underlying occupational therapy has expanded and deepened considerably, suggesting that occupational therapy is on its way to proving itself as one of the truly good ideas for this century, as famous scholars such as Mary Reilly and Elisabeth Yerxa once proposed. Under these circumstances, it has indeed been a pleasure to serve as the invited guest editor for this issue.
In the issue's first paper, Karlsson and Tham provide a profound philosophical and theoretical analysis of two different scientific approaches, i.e. correlating facts and interpreting experiences, taking their point of departure in the phenomenological tradition as founded by Edmund Husserl in 1900/01. In the second paper, Borell and her co-authors present a timely empirical exploration of participation as lived by people, with the aim of further clarifying the much used ICF concept of participation. In the third article, Josephsson and his colleagues explore and contrast two particular possibilities of analysis from within a narrative framework, based on the work of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. In the fourth contribution, Wicks & Whiteford elaborate on the narrative tradition by sharing their views on and experiences of conducting life-history research. In the fifth, Nygård suggests avenues for accessing the experiences of people with dementia through interviews and observations, based on literature and experiences from empirical research. The sixth paper provides an empirical example of how meanings may be explored in real-life contexts as the influence of access technology on the lives of people with dementia in a secure unit is investigated by Margot-Chattin and Nygård. Finally, in the seventh paper, Ivanoff-Dahlin & Hultberg provide a clarifying analysis of focus-group methodology and its scientific underpinnings, and discuss how this particular methodology can be used in occupational therapy research. It is my hope that the topics and the research presented in this issue will bring inspiration and new ideas to colleagues in Scandinavia as well as the international community of occupational therapists and occupational scientists. Louise Nygård Guest Editor Associate Professor, Reg. Occupational Therapist Division of Occupational Therapy Karolinska Institutet Stockholm, Sweden