The Annual Report of Educational Psychology in Japan 2008, Vol.47, 148-158 Qualitative Research in Action:Reflections on its Implications for Educational Psychology Yuji MORO (GRADUATE SCHOOL OF COMPREHENSIVE HUMAN SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF TSUKUBA) In the present article, I review the recent trend toward qualitative methods and research in Japanese educational psychology, focusing mainly on articles that appeared in the Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology. My re-reading of critiques of Yoshida's (1989) research in educational psychology focused the present article on two themes. The first is an appreciation of the meta-theoretical directions in qualitative psychological research. Reviewing how qualitative researchers have connected to and dissociated their work from a traditional positivistic research philosophy allowed me to gain a picture of the inter-relations between various orientations, including constructionism, contextualism, and positivism. The second these relates to problems of interpretation and description in qualitative methods. I contend that interpretive descriptions are based on bidirectional textual work, one direction being dialogical expansive, and the other, a curtailment resulting from interpretive minimalism. Key Words: qualitative methods in educational psychology, meta-theory, positivism, interpretive description, minimalism

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