The latest issue of the Transactional Analysis Journal (TAJ) was published online on 20 July 2026. In their “Letter From the Coeditors,” coeditors Andy Williams and Helen Rowland (2026) offered some thoughts on this special issue.

With this TAJ theme issue entitled “Research in the Social Sciences: Contexts, Challenges, and Worldviews,” we invite you to stop, pause, and be mindful for a moment. Step out of time and reflect on how you know what you know. We invite you to read with all your senses, intuition, and phenomenology and to reflect on the challenges of developing theory and knowledge in the human sciences...

In the call for papers for this theme issue (Rowland & Williams, 2024), we posed some key questions:

• Why do we do research?
• Whose interests does this research serve and to what end or purpose?
• What cultural worldview does this research promote?
• What philosophical assumptions about truth and reality underpin this research?

We were thrilled to receive so many papers engaging directly with this challenge: how to produce an evidence base in an academic world that privileges the measurable and observable above the complex and multilayered nature of human existence...

We suggest that this connection lies in our professional saliency and intentionality as transactional analysts. Specifically, it concerns our willingness to find ways to hear underneath the surface and to engage in rigorous critique, both as active researchers and as consumers of existing literature. To what extent do we, as practitioners, maintain an open and disciplined approach to accessing, synthesizing, and integrating research into our work? Further, are we sustaining a state of professional vigilance, or are we at risk of becoming desensitized—effectively anesthetized—to the point where we lose our capacity for mentalization?

We argue that we are at a pivotal time in accessing and making meaning of data and/or the human experience. Never in human history have we been exposed to so much information. The risk is that we become numbed, too overwhelmed, or defensively exhausted to remain watchful. To function effectively, we must pay attention to our inner world as well as the external and sociopolitical aspects of our context and understand their origins.

The inner world is often understood as the site of immediate, subjective experience—where phenomenology, intuition, and embodied felt sense arise. Yet this interiority is not self-originating. It is shaped by cultural context and transgenerational script, which organize perception, affect, and meaning before they reach awareness. What emerges within this inner field is, therefore, not neutral, but historically and culturally scripted—bringing to the forefront what has been historically coded as significant, threatening, longed for, or precious.

In this sense, our values are not simply chosen but disclosed through experience. These disclosures form the ground of our epistemology, shaping how we understand knowledge to be structured, organized, and curated, and our ontology, shaping what we take to be real or possible. Thus, our way of knowing and our sense of being are both rooted in a culturally mediated, script-informed phenomenological field, informed and deeply influenced from within and from without.

Without this knowledge, we are not only constructing meaning as we go, from within and without, but we are also deeply vulnerable to “poor science” and potentially overwhelmed by the louder, more dominant voices while failing to hear the faint traces of those seldom heard. The “academy” of research lacks innocence; it potentially mirrors the power plays witnessed in the sociopolitical and cultural context.

Many transactional analysts who have been involved in the exam process, either as the examined or the examiner, will be familiar with the opening question for the Certified Transactional Analyst (CTA) and Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst (TSTA) exams. It may sound something like this: “Tell us about your philosophy as a transactional analyst” or “Tell us about your philosophy as a transactional analysis (TA) supervisor, as a TA trainer.” We believe this to be a question about identity—that is, “Who are you as a transactional analyst?”—but is it the right question?

Perhaps a more radical question for us to consider is not only who we are but also how we see the world and how we access the world of research as informed, critical consumers of knowledge. The reflection we encourage in ourselves, our colleagues, trainees, and supervisees is not just “What is my philosophy?” but also “What is my ontology and epistemology?” In other words, how do we construct our meaning of the world: Through which door do you enter the critical, scientific, and theoretical arena? Are you able to recognize and account that this view on the world is not innocent and value-free but slanted and prejudiced through our inner and outer influences?

So, as we move toward talking about the articles in this curated TAJ theme edition, we are presented with a contested, politicized, and often obscured landscape. The papers do not necessarily sit neatly alongside one another, nor do they offer a unified position. Rather, they form a field of inquiry—at times complementary and at other times dissonant—through which we are invited to think more rigorously, and perhaps more uncomfortably, about what we mean by research in TA and the wider social sciences.

Across all the papers, we see key themes and important questions emerge:

• Can research ever be truly objective, or is it always shaped by the positionality and values of the researcher?
• What constitutes valid knowledge, and how do we account for forms of knowing that are relational, embodied, and contextual?
• How do we conduct research that is ethically sound, not only in procedural terms, but in its impact on those whose lives it seeks to understand? This appears to be a question of research stance and positioning.
• And perhaps most pressingly, how do we remain awake—how do we resist the pull toward intellectual complacency, methodological rigidity, and the seduction of certainty?

Included in this issue of the TAJ are the following articles and book review:

• "The ‘Gold Standard’ Myth: Deconstructing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)-Specific Claims in Favor of Common Factors and Cross-Modality Frameworks in Psychotherapy" by Helen Rowland;
• "Losing Women’s and Diverse Voices in the Name of Safety: Reframing Client Vulnerability in Psychotherapy Research" by Rachel Curtis;
• "Most Research in Psychiatry Is Based on Quicksand" by Moniek Thunnissen and Frits Milders;
• "Positioning Case Study Research Within Evidence Hierarchies: Epistemological Tensions in Psychotherapy" by Liz Jeffries;
• "The Potential of Cocreative Research Through a Transactional Analysis Lens" by Emma Jackson;
• "Research in Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy: An Overview, Analysis, and Methodology" by Keith Tudor and Moniek Thunnissen;
• "A Transactional Analysis of Motherhood and Disturbances in the Maternal: From Pre-Conception to Human Being" by Emma Haynes, reviewed by Cinzia Chiesa.