Methodological Considerations of Studying a Unified Approach to Psychotherapy: Integral Methodological Pluralism

This article considers various methodological issues pertinent to how a unified psychotherapeutic approach that is guided by a metatheory can be systematically studied. The currently fragmented state of psychology and psychotherapy is reviewed, and attempts at unification are suggested as a solution to this problem. The epistemological disparities of different research paradigms are examined, including the role that one’s methodology plays in constraining the types of questions asked and thus the types of answers one is likely to find. Alternatives to empiricist-quantitative methodologies are considered, highlighting the need for methodological pluralism, and one specific form of this—integral methodological pluralism (IMP)—is outlined. As conceptual context for IMP, an overview of integral psychotherapy’s core constructs are presented.