Introduction to Special Section: Using Personal Documentary Sources in Psychological Research 1940–1970

Abstract

This Special Section of Qualitative Psychology owes its origin to the comments of Fred Wertz in two forums. The first were his remarks at the opening session on “Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology Past, Present and Future” at the 1st Conference of the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology held on November 14, 2013 at the Graduate Center, CUNY. There Fred briefly summarized the historical roots of qualitative inquiry in psychology. His remarks later appeared in more extended form (Wertz, 2014) as the very first article in the first issue of this journal. His effort to provide an overview of the past in qualitative research is both modest in scope and, of necessity, limited in depth since, he argues, “despite the importance and ubiquity of qualitative inquiry, a comprehensive account of its history in psychology has not been written” (Wertz, 2014, Abstract). Indeed, only a restricted number of previous and partial historiographic studies of qualitative research in psychology have been published, for example, Giorgi, 2009; Morawski, 2011; Wertz, 2011. Erickson’s (2018) survey of the history of qualitative research in the most recent edition of the authoritative Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research fails to focus upon its application in any psychological domain. And, the parallel Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology (Willig & Stainton Rogers, 2017) offers no historical overview of how qualitative inquiry emerged in the discipline. So, in trying to understand the origins and foundations of qualitative practices in psychology, we are faced with limited resources. In both his 2013 talk and 2014 article, Wertz indicated that the publication of Gordon Allport’s, 1942 monograph, The Use of Personal Documents in Psychological Science (UPD), was a crucial landmark, one which served as a “prophetic” call for proper qualitative methodology that was justifiably scientific. “[Allport] asserted that the study of personal documents is indispensible to knowledge of subjective personal life and provides scientific psychology with a touchstone of reality by means of a genuine scientific method” (Wertz, 2014, p. 8). Since I had previously done unpublished archival work on the development of the UPD, I discussed with both Wertz and Ruthellen Josselson, this journal’s editor, the possibility of developing a special section which might deepen the historiography of personal documents in psychological research including Allport’s (1942) own effort. Further, as Wertz (2014) noted “even after (Allport’s, 1942) call, almost 30 years passed before concerted efforts were undertaken to formulate general qualitative methodologies for psychology” (p. 5). Would it be possible to offer some greater insight or detail about how personal documentary data were approached or weighted in the period from roughly the early 1940s until about 1970? Josselson suggested as well that the dearth