Table 1 Becoming a qualitativist: embracing a different way of knowing

1.1. Priming factors, personal fit

1.1.1. Comfort with uncertainty

I'm excited about research that involves applying theory to think about how the social world shapes psychiatric illness. The social sciences intersecting with medicine give me hope for a better understanding of the political and social determinants of health, of so much in our field that is imprecise and uncertain

1.1.2. Interest in narrative and subjectivity

My roots are very much in the arts and the humanities, and it doesn’t feel that I need to put them on hold for the sake of research. To the contrary, they enrich the connections and creativity of my work

1.1.3. Experiences with deconstruction and reconstruction

Research that is based on concrete, almost cinematographic, practical stories; on disjointed scenes from everyday life that are somehow stitched together; that is rooted in the experiential as the starting point

1.1.4. Struggles with identity as a medical researcher

For me, research used to be something deserted, where everything was reduced and abstracted, and then the world was summed up with a few major trends, but that were far removed from reality

1.2. Discovering qualitative research

1.2.1. Learning through other, non-medical fields

He was almost saying, “I’m sorry to tell you, but I think you are just as interested in sociology as in medicine, and I think qualitative methods may be a good fit for you.” I was intrigued, as all the questions I had were always related to how people behave with each other

1.2.2. Stumbling in, not knowing what it was

What's interesting is that it feels like a very old love. As if I knew it all along. I was surprised at first when I learned that there was such a thing. But once I started learning what this thing was about, it didn’t seem so new, it rather seemed a new application of what I had been doing all my life, which is reading and making sense of books and people and their life stories

1.2.3. Drawn in, recalibrated, reinvented

I started my academic career very late because I didn’t think I was cut out for it at all, I didn’t think I had the skills, I didn’t see myself doing quantitative research. I had the maturity to handle it, but not the background, the thinking, the network. Qualitative provided a less daunting entry point; it was welcoming and made clinical sense: it rang true

1.3. Transitioning in

My quantitative work has enriched my qualitative one and vice versa. There is a point in trying to diversify a research portfolio. Two points, actually: a scientific one and a funding one