Abstract The case is made that personal experience and social life are inherently meaningful. The presence of meaning in human affairs requires all participants to develop interpretive skills if they are to understand what is happening. Researching social life is greatly helped by methods that acknowledge the hermeneutical quality of interpersonal experience. The use of qualitative research methods to investigate all aspects of counseling is therefore highly appropriate. To illustrate the use of qualitative research designs and methods of analysis, a study of family members’ views of family therapy is briefly described. Dilemmas of researching human experience Although the debate over whether the social sciences can be objective and explanatory in the manner of the natural sciences is now well-rehearsed, the outcome is still far from clear (Hollis, 1994). The cause of the problem is the self-conscious and self-reflective nature of human beings. Disciplines and practices that study and deal with human behavior and experience have to grapple with some deep philosophical questions to do with the nature of being, knowledge and the methods we might use to investigate them. Is human behavior and experience determined and, if so, by what? To what extent are people able to act freely and be agents of their own destiny? Can we explain to other people, or should we aim to understand them? Whereas the objects of natural science are inherently meaningless, the content of human experience and social intercourse is inherently meaningful. Thus it appears that those who wish to examine people’s behaviors and actions need to develop methods of inquiry that attempt to get on the inside of human experience. Simply observing and measuring what people do certainly generates useful information, but it fails to reach the vast domain of interior experience that most people believe represents the essential nature of their true selves. Those of us who wish to understand social life at the level of the personal and interpersonal feel that as well as to measure and test behavior we must also seek to explore human experience from within. Moreover, to be a human being is, in a deep sense, to be a social being. The subjective tradition aims at an ‘interpretive’ or ‘hermeneutic’ social science: ‘Its central proposition is that the social world must be understood from within, rather than explained from without. Instead of seeking the causes of behavior, we are to seek the meaning of action. Actions derive their meaning from the shared ideas and rules of social life, and are performed by actors who mean something by them’ (Hollis, 1994, pp. 16-17; emphasis added). The insistent nature of these opening paragraphs is deliberate. In the eyes of many researchers, the only good research in the field of therapeutic practices is scientific, naturalistic and experimental. A condition is measured before treatment; sufferers of that condition are randomly allocated to an experimental procedure, to a comparison treatment, or to no treatment at all; and finally, the condition is measured again after the various procedures and treatments have been completed. This works well for physical ills, but