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Qualitative research undertaken by therapists and mental health practitioners is often fraught with problems because we usually want to address problems that arise in practice, rather than questions that arise out of extensive appraisal of a literature. The ostensible purpose of research may be to make a contribution to knowledge, but we typically want to make a contribution to practice, albeit evidence-based practice. This often means trying to understand the experience of an under-researched group or defining a new construct or territory within a neglected topic area. It is sometimes hard to link the questions that arise in clinical contexts to well-established bodies of knowledge. As a result, inexperienced qualitative researchers frequently engage in smallscale exploratory projects, with often ill-defined but clinically important questions. Fortunately, it is not the task of this chapter to consider the problems of how to …