Abstract
Smedslund and Ross (2014) have offered us an interesting opinion article concerning the usefulness of empirical research for psychological practice. Appraisal of research is obviously contingent upon the way it is conceptualized and although the authors are involved with rather different kinds of practical problems they nevertheless conceptualize research in exactly the same way. This entails a possible mismatch between questions asked and methods used to answer them. I will try to add to the discussion by examining more closely how the authors conceptualize research and discuss the problems of mismatch between questions, methods, methodology, and epistemology. I claim that the authors’ view of research misses some important aspects of scientific reasoning and follows an unjustified epistemological position. Part of the arising controversy is a rather natural consequence of this but could be overcome by reconsidering the aims of science and getting epistemology, methodology and questions in line. Although I focus on the specific article and the authors’ positions, I hold that the issues discussed are common and general.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Although the exact criteria for science (and scientific knowledge) are controversial, the claim itself – that it is a special way of creating knowledge – is not.
There are also other fundamental reasons for making questions explicit. First, without doing so it is not possible in principle to know whether a question got answered. If I do not know what I want to know, how do I know that I attained the knowledge? The only answer seems to be that I have to rely on some kind of feeling. I think that this is a very bad criterion of knowledge in any case but it is definitely not acceptable if the endeavor concerns someone else beside the individual researcher engaging in it and science obviously does! The space limitations do not allow me to go further into the issue but it is not as trivial as it might seem to some because there are researchers (usually following some of the qualitative approaches) who actively argue against having research questions and actually do endorse relying on feelings in scientific practice. For a thorough analysis and criticism of these and other problems see Toomela (2011).
Second, some questions are better than others and not all questions are meaningful. “The development of science is not determined so much by answering questions in increasingly exact ways; the development of science is determined by asking the right questions. Already Vygotsky (1982), following Münsterberg, suggested that it is much more meaningful to answer the right question even approximately than to answer the wrong question exactly.” (Toomela, 2010a, p. 9). So the questions need to be made explicit and analyzed in a general theoretical/epistemological framework to judge their relative importance and whether they are worth answering at all.
The adequacy of the theoretical claims is of course a matter of empirical research and testing the assertions in diverse situations and samples is obviously necessary. What counts as diverse is, however, again determined by the theory.
The alternative (actually in use by most scientists [and not just in psychology]) is open concepts (Pap, 2006) which are perfectly fine but require some caution towards them. As Meehl (1978) put it already years ago: “the unavoidability of open concepts in social and biological science tempts us to sidestep it by fake operationism on the one side (if we are of the tough-minded, superscientific orientation) or to be contented with fuzzy verbalisms on the other side (if we are more artsy-craftsy or literary), thinking that it is the best we can get. The important point for methodology of psychology is that just as in statistics one can have a reasonably precise theory of probable inference, being “quasi-exact about the inherently inexact,” so psychologists should learn to be sophisticated and rigorous in their metathinking about open concepts at the substantive level.”
References
Bergman, L. R., & Magnusson, D. (1997). A person-oriented approach in research on developmental psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 9, 291–319.
Bergman, L. R., & Trost, K. (2006). The Person-Oriented Versus the Variable-Oriented Approach: Are They Complementary, Opposites, or Exploring Different Worlds? Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 52, 601–632.
Bergman, L. R., Magnusson, D., & El-Khouri, B. M. (2003). Studying individual development in an interindividual context: A person-oriented approach. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Borsboom, D., Mellenbergh, G. J., & van Heerden, J. (2003). The Theoretical Status of Latent Variables. Psychological Review, 110, 203–219.
Carter, S. M., & Little, M. (2007). Justifying Knowledge, Justifying Method, Taking Action: Epistemologies, Methodologies, and Methods in Qualitative Research. Qualitative Health Research, 17, 1316–1328.
Feest, U. (2005). Operationism in Psychology: What the debate is about, what the debate should be about. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 41, 131–149.
Gigerenzer, G. (1993). The superego, the ego, and the id in statistical reasoning. In G. Keren & C. Lewis (Eds.), A handbook for data analysis in the behavioral sciences: Methodological issues (pp. 311–339). Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates.
Gigerenzer, G. (2004). Mindless statistics. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 33, 587–606.
Koffka, K. (1935). Principles of Gestalt Psychology. London: Lund Humphries.
Lewin, K. (1931). The Conflict Between Aristotelian and Galileian Modes of Thought in Contemporary Psychology. Journal of General Psychology, 5, 141–177.
Meehl, P. E. (1978). Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46, 806–834.
Meehl, P. E. (1993). Philosophy of Science: Help or Hindrance? Psychological Reports, 72, 707–733.
Meehl, P. E. (1997). The Problem Is Epistemology, Not Statistics: Replace Significance Tests by Confidence Intervals and Quantify Accuracy of Risky Numerical Predictions. In L. L. Harlow, S. A. Mulaik, & J. H. Steiger (Eds.), What If There Were No Significance Tests? (pp. 393–425). Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Molenaar, P. C. (2004). A manifesto on psychology as idiographic science: Bringing the person back into scientific psychology, this time forever. Measurement, 2, 201–218.
Molenaar, P. C., & Campbell, C. G. (2009). The New Person-Specific Paradigm in Psychology. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 112–117.
Ohlsson, S. (2010). Questions, Patterns, and Explanations, not Hypothesis Testing, is the Core of Psychology as of any Science. In A. Toomela & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Methodological thinking in psychology: 60 years gone astray? (pp. 27–43). Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.
Ohlsson, S., & Lehtinen, E. (1997). Abstraction and the acquisition of complex ideas. International Journal of Educational Research, 27, 37–48.
Pap, A. (2006). Reduction Sentences and Open Concepts. In A. Keupnik, & S. Shieh (Eds.), The Limits of Logical Empiricism: Selected Papers of Arthur Pap (pp. 295–316). Springer
Smedslund, J. (1991). The Pseudoempirical in Psychology and the Case for Psychologic. Psychological Inquiry, 2, 325–338.
Smedslund, J. (2009). The Mismatch between Current Research Methods and the Nature of Psychological Phenomena: What Researchers Must Learn from Practitioners. Theory & Psychology, 19, 778–794.
Smedslund, J. (2011). Meaning of Words and the Use of Axiomatics in Psychological Theory. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 31, 126–135.
Smedslund, J., & Ross, L. (2014). Research-Based Knowledge in Psychology: What, if anything, is its Incremental Value to the Practitioner? Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science, 48. doi:10.1007/s12124-014-9275-1.
Strong, S. R. (1991). Theory-Driven Science and Naive Empiricism in Counseling Psychology. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 38, 204–210.
Toomela, A. (2007). Sometimes One is More Than Two: When Collaboration Inhibits Knowledge Construction. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 41, 198–207.
Toomela, A. (2010a). Modern mainstream psychology is the best? – Noncumulative, historically blind, fragmented, atheoretical. In A. Toomela & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Methodological Thinking in Psychology: 60 Years Gone Astray? (pp. 1–26). Charlotte: Information Age Publishers.
Toomela, A. (2010b). Quantitative methods in psychology: inevitable and useless. Frontiers in psychology, 1, 29.
Toomela, A. (2011). Travel Into a Fairy Land: A Critique of Modern Qualitative and Mixed Methods Psychologies. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences, 45, 21–47.
von Eye, A., & Bogat, A. G. (2006). Person-Oriented and Variable-Oriented Research: Concepts, Results, and Development. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 52, 390–420.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1982). Istoricheski smysl psikhologicheskogo krizisa. Metodologicheskoje issledovanije. (Historical meaning of the crisis in psychology. A methodological investigation. Originally written in 1927; First published in 1982). In A. R. Luria & M. G. Jaroshevskii (Eds.), L. S. Vygotsky. Sobranije sochinenii. Tom 1. Voprosy teorii i istorii psikhologii. (pp. 291–436). Moscow: Pedagogika.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Tammik, V. Appraisal of Research Depends Upon its Conceptualization. Integr. psych. behav. 48, 384–392 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-014-9282-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-014-9282-2