Phenomenon-driven research and systematic research assembling: Methodological conceptualisations for psychology’s epistemic projects

Abstract

This article contributes to psychology’s epistemic project by proposing a methodology that foregrounds the relation between research methods and subject matter. Considering method-driven and subject-driven approaches as being opposite poles of a continuum, the science of psychology has historically tended toward emphasising one or the other. Method-driven approaches claim legitimacy through an emphasis on a unifying standardised method, while subject-driven approaches insist on human-centred conceptions of psychology’s subject matter. Both poles are accompanied by one-sided methods-to-matter relations which limit the ways in which phenomena can be known in surprising and unforeseen ways. Phenomenon-driven research conceptualises the engagement with methods and matter as mutually intra-acting. Systematic research assembling points to the practical crafting of research activities through ongoing engagement with how phenomena can be known through intra-action. In our time of particularly unsettled, changing, and complex phenomena, psychology’s epistemic projects need methodologies that aim at ways of knowing that can bring out the unexpected.

Theoretical dialogue and interdisciplinary relevance: Thirty years of Theory & Psychology

“…Dialogue is necessary in many forms and across many boundaries, but I would like to note here two particular forms of dialogue that are particularly relevant to the work published in Theory & Psychology. The first kind are the conversations between scholars who generally do not believe that their work is based on any theoretical presuppositions and theoreticians who want to convince them otherwise (see, e.g., Huniche & Sørensen, 2019); the second is between scholars who work in different paradigms and are explicitly committed to divergent theoretical frameworks (e.g., debates between advocates for critical realism vs. relativism; Edwards et al, 1995;Parker, 1999).…”

The Epistemic Imperialism of Science. Reinvigorating Early Critiques of Scientism

“…Postmodernism can be broadly understood as an attempt to reemphasis precisely those elements of our lives that tend to be marginalized or overlooked within positivistic epistemology ( Hicks, 2011 ). Nevertheless, despite the best efforts of postmodern thinkers to tear down positivism, despite the label of positivism being disavowed by most and even seen as “perverse” by many psychologists today ( Smythe, 1992 ), and despite increasingly evident epistemological and practical shortcomings of positivistic epistemologies (e.g., as seen in the “replication crisis” in psychology), positivism remains on center stage in mainstream psychology, teetering between being a philosophy and a methodology ( Huniche and Sørensen, 2019 ). While the label of positivism is rarely explicitly used today, and even less so as a form of self-identification, exploring its influence on current psychology is in no way to “kick a dead horse,” as the expression goes, precisely because the “horse is far from dead.…”

Psychology’s epistemic projects

“…The articles in this volume speak to different, limited areas of psychology’s epistemic projects. Adjei (2019), Derksen (2019), Elgaard Jensen (2019), and also Huniche and Sørensen (2019a) attend to epistemic projects of academic psychology. Mora-Gámez and Brown (2019) inquire how psychology is applied in its practical involvement in post-conflict reparation services.…”

“…Contrary to this, Derksen shows that the epistemic project of mainstream psychology is currently reshaped by transforming Popperian principles from an ex-post guiding of the evaluation of science to an ex-ante guiding of scientific practice. Derksen suggests that a debate on the epistemic projects of this methods-driven research practice in psychology (see Huniche & Sørensen, 2019a) remains vague. He points to the necessity of discussing the purpose, scope, and limitations of applying quantitative methods and experiments for engaging with psychology’s epistemic projects.…”

“…In the last article in this special issue, Lotte Huniche and Estrid Sørensen (2019a) argue that psychology’s epistemic projects are inadequate for the world of today where natures, cultures, social relations, and categories are best characterised as being in a state of rapid transformation. They inquire into methodological questions of psychology’s epistemic projects and how to engage with such a world.…”