Chapter 9: Qualitative Developmental Psychology

Developmental psychology—like psychology in general for decades dominated by quantitative methods and a preference for so called “hard” data— is showing an increasing interest in using qualitative methods for reconstructing the developmental conditions and contexts, the life stories and individual experiences from the perspective of the subjects. This interest was aroused, at the latest, as developmental psychology began to look at the individual in his or her life-word, a world which is being interpreted by the actively acting and potentially self-reflexive subject. Doing this, researchers started to focus on and recognize (at least partially) the subject as a constructor of his or her own life as programmatically expressed thirty years ago in the concept of “individuals as producers of their development” (Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981).