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The scientific study of the qualities of individual human lives, rather than of their average quantities in aggregations of lives

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Abstract

The full variety of how individual human lives are lived and why so is what matters for scientific human Psychology (SHP) theory and practice research purposes. How representative of the human population are the fractions of each such variety sampled matters for social science and policy purposes. What varieties are obtained and how representative their sample fractions are of those in the human population depends upon how the sampling was done. The exact number of persons in these samples matters only for statistical significance testing purposes. Univariate means and variances and bi- or multi-variate regressions and correlations of variables are the Linear Model statistics SHP presently predominantly depends upon. These statistics are averages in aggregations of persons so not descriptive of individual persons, and why persons in such aggregations deviate from the average is generally not explored. A description of how a human life is lived and a causal explanation of why so necessarily involve quantities in the form of gradations on dimensions. Each description and explanation is a conjunction of gradations, one from each of several dimensions, so the essential difference between qualitative and quantitative SHP research is between dealing with each individual case and dealing only with the statistics of aggregations of cases.

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Notes

  1. It is not logically necessary, but merely presently fashionable, that SHP theory be Linear Model theory. Imperfect fits (i.e., R2 < 1) of Linear and so Structural Equation Models should all be considered either disconfirmations or inadequate tests of these models/theories (see, e.g., Bollen and Pearl 2012; Chin 2010; Krause 2013a; McDonald 2010; Roberts and Pashler 2000; Rozeboom 2009; Ullman and Bentler 2012, for their caveats about SEM).

  2. There also are other very different ways in which qualitative as well as quantitative SHP research does not simply reveal the psychological nature of humanity. Being respectfully and empathically studied, interviewed, measured as a person (see, e.g., Denzin 2001; Yeo et al. 2014) cannot reasonably be supposed to always leave one unchanged. One cannot help learning more about what one’s life is and is not like, and about what one’s studiers-interviewers-measurers seem to find noteworthy and what not noteworthy in it. So SHP research properly cannot ignore its own impact on those studied, although it has so far failed to make reports of what this is easy to find (two are Kraut and McConahay 1973; Wallerstein and Duran 2006). SHP research must take account of how it itself influences the nature of those it studies and thereby to some extent the nature of the rest of humanity, because some of the rest learn truly or falsely about and are affected by the findings of SHP studies, react to not having been chosen for study, or are now differently affected by those who were chosen (Krause, M. S., manuscript: Psychological measuring and measurements: Their possible effects on persons measured and unmeasured).

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    Merton S. Krause

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Krause, M.S. The scientific study of the qualities of individual human lives, rather than of their average quantities in aggregations of lives. Qual Quant 52, 1315–1329 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0523-6

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