How Do You Research Something That Doesn't Have a Map Yet? - Building the Model: Part 2
For months, I went in circles. That is not the kind of thing researchers are supposed to say out loud, because research gets presented after the fact, cleaned up and sequenced, and it looks like the researcher always knew where they were going. But I think there is something worth naming in the honest version of the process, particularly for the practitioners and scholars in my audience who are themselves trying to build things in spaces where the literature is thin.
The question I was trying to answer had not been asked in quite this way: could the structure of Luke 10:27-28 serve as an organizing framework for the well-being constructs already present in the Christian Psychology literature, and could those constructs be meaningfully mapped against a positive psychology framework without losing their emic meaning? I could see the pieces in the literature. What I could not find was a study that had organized them into something that preserved their theological integrity and made them operationally useful for practitioners. The methodology I chose would determine whether I was conducting legitimate research or simply confirming what I already believed.
That question kept me going in circles. Capstone or research project. Thematic analysis or content analysis. And then I made a mind map.
What the mind map showed me was this: the constructs I was working with were already named. They had definitions and source citations and prevalence patterns across the literature. They were not waiting to be discovered through interpretive analysis. They were waiting to be organized. That distinction is the methodological pivot. Thematic analysis is designed for unstructured data, to surface patterns that are not yet explicit. What I had was named, structured material that needed a framework capable of holding it. That is content analysis. Specifically, directed qualitative content analysis.
DQCA was well suited to this work because the Christian Psychology (CP) literature largely presented named, identifiable constructs that were better organized than interpreted. The deductive side of the approach uses an existing theoretical framework as an entry point. The inductive side keeps the method honest about what the data adds or complicates beyond what that framework can hold. I came in with a theoretically informed prior: that Luke 10:27-28 would organize what the CP literature was already saying, based on the consistent relational hierarchy of loving God, loving oneself, and loving others that appeared across four independent CP flourishing models prior to coding. The method I chose was designed to give the data permission to tell me I was wrong. It turned out I wasn't. But that finding only carries weight because the method could have shown me otherwise.
The scaffolding that made this comparison possible was the Hierarchical Framework of Well-being, or HiFWB, developed by Disabato and colleagues in 2025. HiFWB is a four-level organizational structure that arranges well-being constructs under a broad general heading, divided into lenses, content areas, and discrete characteristics. Its design is explicitly capable of accommodating constructs from different philosophical traditions, which made it the right entry point for mapping CP constructs alongside PP constructs without flattening either. In Episode 2 of Building the Model you can see the actual research artifacts on screen: the PRISMA systematic review flow diagram, the sources screening database, and the HiFWB table itself. The rigor is not described. It is shown.
Episode 3 is where the literature starts talking back, including in ways I had anticipated, and one significant way I had not.
