Rethinking Methods In Psychology

The recent widespread rejection of conventional theory and method has led to the evolution of different ways of gathering and analyzing data. This accessible textbook introduces key research methods that challenge psychology's traditional preoccupation with `scientific' experiments. The book provides a well-structured guide to methods, containing a range of qualitative approaches (for example, semi-structured interviews, grounded theory, discourse analysis) alongside a reworking of quantitative methods to suit contemporary psychological research. A number of chapters are also explicitly concerned with research as a dynamic interactive process. The internationally respected contributors steer the reader through the main stag

This text provides a critique of the mainstream theoretical foundations ranging from phenomenology and symbolic interactionism to cultural and feminist approaches. Contributors present key strands of theory, showing how they feed into the debate about the creation of a new psychology.

This introductory text presents a coherent overview of prevalent theories, methods and applications within contemporary health psychology.

This book offers arguments against the view that interpersonal understanding involves a 'folk' or 'commonsense' psychology, a view which Ratcliffe suggests is a theoretically motivated abstraction. His alternative account draws on phenomenology, neuroscience and developmental psychology, exploring patterned interactions in shared social situations.

After over three decades of continual publication in multiple editions, the Third Edition of Rethinking Psychological Anthropology, now with coauthor Stephen Leavitt, describes the latest interests, concepts, and approaches in the field with the inclusion of four new chapters and updates to earlier topics. The premise of the previous editions remains: that all anthropology is psychological and that the interplay between anthropological methods and the psychological theories existing in different times is dialectical. Psychological anthropologists have grappled with changing trends in both disciplines, including psychoanalytic, holistic, cognitive, interpretive, and developmental approaches. It is important to appreciate these currents of thought to understand the state of the field today. This text is thus a guide to that history along with a critique that may lead to a new synthesis. It is an ideal choice for courses in psychological anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, and the history of anthropology.

Since the very first ‘co-operative’ school opened its doors in 2008, the complicated relations between ‘co-operative’ approaches to schooling and democratic subjectivity remain unexplored. This ground breaking book considers the role of ‘voice’ in co-operative schooling and its place in radical research, offering an original, critical analysis of an alternative model of ‘co-operative’ schooling set within the context of the contemporary public education sector in England. Drawing on post structural theory and critical ethnographic research, the author explores how this model might offer new ways of thinking about what education is for and who stands to benefit or lose when schools adopt co-operative ways of working together across the structures of governance, pedagogy and curriculum. The book considers how participatory ways of working in education might inform a more critical educational psychology that takes engendering equality and collective well-being as an alternative starting point to measuring individual achievement and cognitive development. This text will appeal to advanced level undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and practitioners, particularly in the field of psychology, education, politics and social research, with an interest in developing a critical appreciation of inequalities in education and in reimagining the possibilities for change.

This volume examines the limitations of mathematical logic and proposes a new approach to logic intended to overcome them. To this end, the book compares mathematical logic with earlier views of logic, both in the ancient and in the modern age, including those of Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant. From the comparison it is apparent that a basic limitation of mathematical logic is that it narrows down the scope of logic confining it to the study of deduction, without providing tools for discovering anything new. As a result, mathematical logic has had little impact on scientific practice. Therefore, this volume proposes a view of logic according to which logic is intended, first of all, to provide rules of discovery, that is, non-deductive rules for finding hypotheses to solve problems. This is essential if logic is to play any relevant role in mathematics, science and even philosophy. To comply with this view of logic, this volume formulates several rules of discovery, such as induction, analogy, generalization, specialization, metaphor, metonymy, definition, and diagrams. A logic based on such rules is basically a logic of discovery, and involves a new view of the relation of logic to evolution, language, reason, method and knowledge, particularly mathematical knowledge. It also involves a new view of the relation of philosophy to knowledge. This book puts forward such new views, trying to open again many doors that the founding fathers of mathematical logic had closed historically. trigger

The motivation for this volume in the History and Theory of Psychology series is to look across sub-disciplines within psychology and highlight instances where researchers transcended the tendency to think about methodology along traditional lines. Contributors have located examples of researchers who built upon existing ideas to create methods true to their interests and theoretical convictions. Emerging Methods in Psychology shows how a discipline creates new methods and carves out possibilities that not only generate data, but also advance knowledge of human psychological functioning. It concentrates on showcasing the possibilities that exist when the researcher focuses on the relationship between theory, method, and data. The question of what kind of expertise is required is a key issue. This is particularly the case in psychology where the tradition of standardizing methods over the last century has served to stabilize research questions. Knowledge creation is deeply affective and ambiguous rather than the secure accumulation of data by a socially legitimized procedure. This innovative volume moves beyond psychology as social engineering into new varieties of social knowledge.