Lego Serious Play in Psychology: Exploring Its Use in Qualitative Interviews

Lego Serious Play (LSP) developed in corporate settings to encourage collaboration, problem-solving, and drive creativity. As a creative research method, LSP is relatively under-researched. The constructive ‘build, share, listen’ process of LSP has considerable potential to promote reflection and elicit talk in phenomenological research interviews. We draw on our experiences using LSP in interviews to explore the meaning of happiness with five young adults in Hong Kong, who had moved back to their parental home. We explain our approach and discuss the potential benefits, limitations and considerations when using LSP to enhance individual interviews. It is a participant-led approach, which reduces anxiety, enables ‘flow,’ self-expression and reflection, access to tacit knowledge, use of metaphor and symbolism. Considerations and limitations include the time burden, aspects of our approach which were more researcher- than participant-led, potential improvements to enhance data generation and ethical reflections on the cathartic nature of the LSP-supported interviews.