Psychological Methodology will Change Profoundly Due to the Necessity to Focus on Intra-individual Variation

Commentaries

Abstract

I am in general agreement with Toomela’s (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science doi:10.1007/s12124-007-9004-0, 2007) plea for an alternative psychological methodology inspired by his description of the German–Austrian orientation. I will argue, however, that this alternative methodology has to be based on the classical ergodic theorems, using state-of-the-art statistical time series analysis of intra-individual variation as its main tool. Some more specific points made by Toomela will be criticized, while for others a more extreme elaboration along the lines indicated by Toomela is proposed.

Keywords

Ergodicity Intra-individual variation 

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Copyright information

© Springer Science & Business Media, LLC 2007

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.The Pennsylvania State UniversityUniversity ParkUSA

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