Heidi M. Levitt, Ph.D.

Professor Heidi M. Levitt is Editor of Qualitative Psychology  (5-year IF: 11.6) and has been an Associate Editor for the journals Psychotherapy Research and Qualitative Psychology.   Other leadership roles have included being a past-president of the Society of Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP), section of Division 5 of the American Psychological Association (APA; Quantitative and Qualitative Methods). She chaired the development of the SQIP recommendations for reviewing and designing qualitative research (Levitt et al., 2017).  As well, she chaired the development of the inaugural APA Journal Article Reporting Standards for qualitative, qualitative meta-analytic, and mixed methods research (JARS-Qual; Levitt et al., 2018) and facilitated their integration into the 7th edition of the Publication Manual of the APA (APA, 2020).  The APA Manual informs the reporting and reviewing of journal articles in psychology and other social sciences.  These guidelines framed the methodological integrity across approaches to qualitative research as based upon the adaptation of methods to the researchers' approaches to inquiry, participants' characteristics, and the study aims -- advancing a coherent understanding of a broad range of methodological perspectives in psychology, including critical and constructivist science.  Other methodological contributions include a conceptualization of qualitative generalization (Levitt, 2021), a critical-feminist approach to consensus and intersubjective agreement (Levitt et al., 2021), a methodological justification for positionality and reflexivity reflections (Levitt & Pierorazio, in press), and the methods of critical-constructivist grounded theory research (CCGT; Levitt, 2021) and integrative mixed methods meta-analysis (IMMMA; Levitt, 2024). As well, she wrote and narrated a freely-accessible APA film called, Recommendations for Reviewing Qualitative Research, to provide guidance for reviewers of APA journals.  

Based on 25+ years of qualitative, participatory, and community-focused research, Dr. Levitt has developed a empirically-based cyclical meta-theory based in the lived experiences of people within gender minority communities (drag, butch, femme, bear, leather, trans and nonbinary).  Rather than focusing on one aspect of gender, her work describes the interconnections between gender norms, felt sense of gender, gender identity, gender expression, and gendered sexuality to reveal how gender functions writ large (Levitt, 2019a, 2019b & upcoming book).  Her work has contributed an LGBTQ+ inclusive understanding of gender that centers the agency of gender diverse people and offers a genealogical historicity documenting how and why gender communities have developed.  This work shows why gender identities continue to evolve and how sexuality and gender are intrinsically interconnected.  

As well, she has developed empirically-supported interventions that that help people to resolve sexual and gender-related stigma experiences, in collaboration with her colleagues (see Levitt et al., 2021).  These interventions have been found to reduce depressive symptoms and event-related stress across studies of LGBTQ+ identities (see LGBTQMentalHealth.com).

Professor Levitt's psychotherapy research has focused on transtheoretical and transdiagnostic processes and outcomes (especially related to client experiences of agency, therapist responsiveness, and the strategic use of silences in therapy) -- leading to the identification of principles to guide in-session clinical practice (e.g., Levitt et al., 2016).  Her work has advanced an understanding of the clients' role in psychotherapy, therapists clinical decision-making processes, and practices of agency-enhancing psychotherapy.  

She coordinated an international team of qualitative psychotherapy researchers to develop a paper on the need to expand the evidentiary basis of clinical practice guidelines to include qualitative research, with methodological guidance for this task (Levitt, 2024).  In relation to this work, she serves as a member of the Advisory Steering Committee (ASC) for the Development of Clinical Practice Guidelines of APA that provides guidance for APA task forces developing clinical practice guidelines (e.g., see APA statement on evidentiary basis of guidelines).