Ideological Validity: Mainstream Psychology and Its Choking Psychometric Imperative

Most of the students in psychology—especially those studying in the Western World (Europe, the USA)—are told that psychology should not analyze everyday interactions of people. We were told that such a perspective would be non-scientific as we are not able to control specific variables within such an analysis (Bortz & Schuster, 2010). The consequence is that from the very beginning of our studies, we are disciplined to not psychologize how human beings operate in their everyday environment. We learn that psychology as a science comes only into being when controlling and manipulating specific variables within a specific methodology (Bühner & Ziegler, 2009). Psychometric criteria are the holy grail in order to understand psychological experience and human conduct (Field, 2009). Hence, we are appealed to not act upon our daily observations, to refrain from any possible interpretation, and to not suggest any interventions that are not based upon these criteria. Conclusions and recommendations should be only based upon valid research (Sedlmeier & Renkewitz, 2018). Valid means in this regard psychometrically sound, and psychometrically sound is a particular kind of threshold statistics based upon some mathematical models (Field, 2009; Michell, 2003, 2009). All other conclusions and recommendations are considered doubtful and regarded as non-scientific (Toomela, 2009).

Yet, the very notion of validity depends upon the psychologist’s viewpoint (Valsiner, 2017). There are multiple ways how valid research comes into being and thus how it is interpreted. Validity in its very own way means the transparency of our scientific inquiry. Statistical methods and their conventional thresholds (significance levels as well as effect sizes) are just one way among many to determine scientific validity (Ohlsson, 2009). Scientific validity broadly defined means the transparency of our scientific inquiry which catalyzes the understanding why and how we have performed a specific sort of investigation and how the reason and the methods do relate to the results.

In the best possible scenario, this validity helps researchers to replicate their investigation or, respectively, to build upon their findings. However, this does not mean that other criteria that enable the researcher to reach that scientific transparency are interpreted as non-scientific or as scientifically doubtful. Such a perspective concerning a science’s validity is ideological and inhibits the development of science that is necessarily pluralistic. If my observation or experiment can be understood and justified based on a transparent methodological protocol, the way how this validity is reached needs to be indispensably open (Boesch, 1971). Yet, the researcher needs to justify why he is inclined to investigate the phenomenon and why this or that method is more adequate than another. If he just relies on a methodological protocol in order to conform to certain psychometric criteria—that make his article more standardized and henceforth publishable—but does not question himself whether this method is the appropriate tool to capture the phenomenon, methods become an end in itself (Bruner, 1990; Valsiner, 2017). Phenomena might be then analyzed from a rigid scientific perspective because it is the way how to do psychology, e.g., the presuppositions of what psychology needs to do in order to reach validity (Bruner, 1997). All phenomena that do not fit within this methodological corset are then considered as non-scientific and not analyzable.

AlltagspsychologieFootnote 1 is such a phenomenon which mainstream psychology tries to neglect as their conventional statistical methods—and their statistical interpretation of the term validity—cannot explain everyday phenomena. This is the reason why young psychology students are disciplined to analyze a specific set of phenomena and to refrain from their early interests in understanding everyday interactions, for example. Yet, by bracketing this field of interest, we deprive psychology of its very own creativity and drive.

I am aware that mainstream psychology would argue that they analyze these phenomena, too. Social Psychology might be such a discipline in which one comes across a study setting that includes everyday interactions. Yet, from my personal experience having studied at four different universities (Germany, Luxembourg, Swiss, UK) and interacting with many different students, complex processes such as identity and intergroup contact is now studied within a statistical tool kit (see Cakal et al., 2011) disregarding the cultural setting of the participants. Populism is another domain where questionnaires are favored over an ecological approach (Vehrkamp & Merkel, 2018) understanding where a person comes from and why s/he learns to embrace a specific attitude (see for an alternative approach Lichtenberg, 2012). Knowing that the curriculum is mostly stable—due to the Bologna reformation in Europe—I am convinced that my experience is not a simple exception. And even if we come across a theory of conformity such as the famous Milgram experiment, we do not discuss the generalizability of the experiment onto everyday interactions.

Even Clinical Psychology, the discipline that should focus the individual and its relation to the environment is more and more dominated by providing universal recipes for specific symptoms or diseases (see Smedslund & Ross, 2014). So, even if there are some disciplines that might say they were to study everyday phenomena, their toolkits are not sufficient to unravel the complex implications of their investigation. I argue that students—at least in the Western World—are mostly caught up in this dilemma between the experience of not being said to analyze everyday interactions – as this would threaten the holy grail of psychometric criteria—and the pseudo-empirical stance (Smedslund, 1991, 2009, 2016) of mainstream psychology wanting to analyze exactly those phenomena, yet not having an adequate toolkit that takes into account the dynamic of the person and the environment (Valsiner, 2017; Fircks, 2021c).Footnote 2 Either way, the remedy for this dilemma is to provide students and professors with a flexible approach of analyzing everyday actions and interactions, ecologically valid. This is the purpose of the present paper: to present a framework on which one can rely on in order to analyze everyday interactions, ecologically valid which includes a theoretical and methodological schedule, and which helps students as well as professors to step out of the above-described dilemma.

Alltagspsychologie as a Valid Alternative

Let us first define what Alltagspsychologie is in order to experience the potential fruits of this scientific field of interest. Alltagspsychologie interests itself in all phenomena that are part of daily human conduct (Bruner, 1997; Valsiner, 2014). Potential field of inquiries are how people wake up, prepare breakfast, go to work or school, do their coffee breaks, interact with their colleagues or clients, go back home, relax, meet friends, eat dinner together (or alone), talk with family and friends, watch television, and so forth. Here, Alltagspsychology focuses upon human actions that are performed every day (Bruner, 1997) and that are meaningful, subjectively (Bruner, 1990).

The Ecological Imperative of Alltagspsychologie

Yet, it is important that Alltagspsychologie tries to see these phenomena within an ecological perspective. With ecological perspective I mean that the human being is not separated from his environment while trying to understand his operations or functioning (Lang, 1992, 1993, 1997). Him waking up needs to be understood while assessing the individual’s bedroom, the way how it might be arranged, the time when light comes into his room, how he interacts with electronical devices in that room or in short, and the way how his sleep is organized. Yet, the sleep’s organization is not solely analyzed while only studying the human being getting to sleep. No, the complex actions that prepare him for going to sleep as well as the actions that follow him waking up are analyzed in conjunction. Sleep is a complex environmental phenomenon which is actually structured by a human being in a complex way and in a complex environment. Here, we are interested how the human being relates to the object sleep, thus how he interprets his very own sleep’s organization and which actions follow from that interpretation. Again, this interpretation is only to be understood while getting a glimpse into his complex, structured environment (Fircks, 2021a, 2021b, 2021d).

Him putting in ear plugs, for example, is understood against the background of his room being near to a highly frequented street. Him checking his mails before going to bed, needs to be understood against the background of his complex job position and the responsibility he feels for it. All these complex phenomena do show that a human being relates to a specific object in specific ways. Understanding these phenomena is only possible when understanding the individual’s environment (Valsiner, 2014, 2019). A person living in the countryside, for example, relates differently to the issue of sleep than, for example, a person living in an urban area. Yet, both might develop sleeping issues. The person in the countryside wakes up too early because of his/her neighbor farmers starting their day with threshing. The person living in the urban area wakes up early too, yet not because there is somebody threshing in the early hours but because of morning traffic. Both times, the object is the same (sleeping issues), yet the way how each individual relates to that diverges, drastically. And it is by this unique relatedness towards the object based upon the unique relation of an individual to his environment, that we could not prescribe a universal medicine to both clients if we were sleep therapists. The meaning of the sleeping problems hides itself in the unique relation of a person to his environment. Bracketing this relation results in considering both sleeping issues similar which would result in prescribing same interventions or solutions for the issue at stake. Quantitative, mainstream psychology would argue for instance that the major cause for sleeping issues is stress (Kim & Dimsdale, 2007). Yet, how does stress emerge? How does stress come into being? This is not something that a researcher could determine with pre-defined items and questionnaires (Rosenbaum & Valsiner, 2011). On the contrary, this is only possible while getting a glimpse into the unique relatedness of a person with his environment (Fircks, 2021c). It was Lazarus (Lazarus & Alfert, 1964; Lazarus et al., 1965) who understood well the important implications of cognitive appraisal (interpretation) processes and their moderating effect upon the experience of stress. Yet, we are inclined to study these appraisal mechanisms within a cultural environment in which they are actually transmitted. Solely studying the appraisal mechanisms and their effect upon the experience of stress without deciphering their cultural background and pathways of transmission is leaving out an important component within the understanding of the genesis of stress.

Cultural Psychology and Alltagspsychologie

Alltagspsychologie tries to shed light onto this unique relatedness (Bruner, 1997). Yet, in order to investigate those phenomena validly, we do need a specific scientific stance of approaching phenomena. Cultural Psychology might be such an appropriate stance. Cultural Psychology analyzes this unique relatedness of concrete human beings in their specific environments (2022a; von Fircks, 2021c, 2021d) which is called culture (Valsiner, 2014, 2019). Culture can be understood here as an action field (Boesch, 1991, 1998) that is structured by needs and goals that develop while a person relates to his environment (Boesch, 2002; Lewin, 1926). A need for peace emerges in times of war. A need for social stimulation emerges in times of isolation. Yet, this need for social stimulation depends in the end upon the person; the ascetic, for example, does embrace isolation in order to find meaning within the silence. Him encountering isolation does not develop in him having the need for social contacts, ongoingly.

Such an approach to culture overcomes monistic definitions of culture either focusing too rigidly upon the cultural embeddedness of people or upon the person interpreting this cultural embeddedness. It is close to Leontev’s concept of meaning (1978). The environment provides people with an objective (materialized) meaning (go out, do not isolate yourself, socialize), yet this objective meaning can be personally appropriated by relating to it with a specific, personal sense (Blinzler, 2014) such as I find purpose (personal sense) in silence. When I speak about culture—and especially about personal culture—I remain within this subjective–objective framework of approaching culture beyond monistic conceptions. When I speak later in the manuscript about different kinds of culture (eating culture, sleeping culture), these termini need to be understood within the above-mentioned framework. Thus, culture becomes subjective in a way of individuals interpreting subjectively environmental givens (Toomela, 2021).

Social isolation is in the first example a phenomenon that is interpreted, negatively. It does have a negative valence (see Fig. 1); thus, the person in our example tries to avoid it by different means (symbolized by the different arrows) such as going to a sports club, to board games and so forth.

Fig. 1
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Avoiding social isolation by different means (based on Lewin et al., 1939) g −  = goal (not-attractive), g +  = goal (attractive)

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Yet, the actual paths of how to circumvent social isolation depends upon the environmental givens of the person. Does the town possess different sports clubs? Does the town organize board games? Trying to get social stimulation is, for example, different for a person in a university town than for a person in a rural area. The unique relatedness of human beings to a specific object (social isolation) as well as its stance towards (personal sense) it can only be understood when getting a glimpse into the wider structure of his/her environment (Bruner, 1997). Graumann (1984, 2002) calls this the social situatedness of man (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
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Avoiding social isolation within a rural area

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Cultural Psychology Helping to Understand Everyday Phenomena

When trying to understand personal culture (unique relatedness), we are thus appealed to understand not only the different ways how a person interprets a phenomenon as well as the consequences that might result from this interpretation, but we are also inclined to understand the environmental context, the situatedness of our person, within this interpretation (Fircks, 2021d). It is this situatedness that will modify the way how the person will relate to the issue at stake. In a rural area, a person wanting to get social stimulation might join the local football club. In an urban area, a person verbalizing a similar need might join a rhetoric club organized by his/her university. Both actions do seem similar from the outset (social stimulation), yet the paths and their horizon (future potential experiences) will diverge drastically. In the present example, this situatedness is necessary social. In the light of this social situatedness, the persons approaching other people in both examples will make different experiences and will be shaped by the clubs, uniquely. Personal cultureFootnote 3 develops as we do meet other people within their unique relatedness and while getting a glimpse into their personal culture (Bruner, 1997). It is within this unique social situatedness that we will make different, further experiences altering the organization of our very own culture. This is called the temporality of our being (Graumann, 1984, 2002).

Interested readers might know the situation if one befriends a new person, for example, and it is within this friendship that one becomes aware of some needs and goals that are for the other person central and that might be central for one, too. A friend shows us, for example, a new dish while cooking for us, and it was so tasty that next week I do a similar dish for my family. This also accounts for more psychic phenomena. If I have a new boyfriend that is tidier than me, I might realize while immerging into his culture (his personal room), that I do want to be tidier, too. The beauty of the social situatedness of our being hides itself in the fact, that we constantly actualize and re-actualize our needs by meeting and learning from other people (Perls et al., 2000; Polster & Polster, 1973). And it is within these encounters and learning opportunities that we become aware of what might be good for us and our lives as well as of those that share our action fields. The temporality of being is a potentiality of being (see Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
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Temporality of being

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The consequence is that personal culture is a function of the individual’s interpretations (IV), within his unique social situatedness (USS) and temporality of being (TB), C(f) = IV, USS, TB. We have defined here culture as something openly structured and constantly re-structured something that is in line with leading prominent cultural psychologists such as Bruner (1997), Boesch (1991), Toomela (2021), or Valsiner (2007, 2014). Yet, a concrete equation was missing.

But what is the difference to other equations in Psychology being important for Cultural Psychology? It is in this regard that we need to mention Lewin’s equation that behavior is a function of person and environment, B(f) = P, E relying on the person’s needs and the valences of the environment (Lewin, 1926) that attract him for the need satisfaction or makes him to avoid negatively connotated goals. What I miss in the Lewinian equation is that the environment gets not only interpreted in regards to specific needs and goals but that the relation to the environment bears something deeper such as the personal sense as advocated by Leontʹev (1978); the individual interpretation of the environment is leading us to the personal sense making process of the individual that is embedded in that environment. Analyzing needs and goals that do emerge while a person relates to a specific—objective—environment is not enough; we need to decipher the personal sense of the individual in a specific environment in order to unravel the personological emergence of needs and goals.

We have now elaborated a specific equation that can be flexibly applied to multiple situations of our psychological field of inquiry. The advantage of such an open equation is that we can use it situationally and adaptively for multiple purposes. This enhances the degree of analyzing psychological phenomena validly meaning to enhance a certain degree of transparency within our fields of interests. This allows us to analyze phenomena that are constantly developing while we do not fix them within a specific definition. The open definition of culture—as advocated in the present paper—helps us in the end to not choke the actual nature of cultural phenomena which are necessarily open.

The Need for Openly Constructed Methods

Having now clarified a specific equation and its advantage for analyzing human phenomena that are part and parcel of our everyday living, we need to admit that this is only one half of the truth. Something more is required. In order to apply that flexible equation to multiple domains of inquiry, we are appealed to define methods through which we are able to understand the actualization and re-actualization of culture, in time. We are in need of such methods that help future researchers as well as criticists to understand how we can apply psychology meaningfully to our everyday occurrence. Methods are important for providing orientation and transparency. Yet, as our equation suggests, they need to be applied to a variety of purposes, flexibly. Hence, they must not be rigidly applied but their purpose needs to be shaped and re-shaped by the actual researcher (Valsiner, 2017). And surely, they need to be able to decipher how culture comes into being, personologically, situationally, and in time (Wagoner, 2009). This is a complex endeavor, and methods that capture these characteristics are rare (Valsiner, 2017).

Trajectory Equifinality Approach (TEA) to Understand Open Cultural Phenomena

Yet, there are some such as the trajectory equifinality approach (Sato & Tanimura, 2016; Sato et al., 2009). At the very heart of the model, there is an important goal for a person to reach. This is the equifinality point. Yet, there are multiple ways how to reach that point called trajectories. Each trajectory comes with its opposite that is distancing the individual from his goal or renders the goal-attainment difficult (Zittoun & Valsiner, 2016). Different trajectories are related with each other, in time (see Fig. 4). Wanting to join a football club, an individual phones, for example, his friend being already part of the football club. The friend says that he should accompany him next time. So, both go the training the next day. Here, our individual talks to the trainer and asks for specific information. The trainer suggests, for example, to do a try out and to talk to him later whether he could imagine becoming a part of the team.

Fig. 4
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TEM for going to a football session

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The model shows that past, present, and future of a specific culture are always related and need to be reconciled (Fircks, 2020). An action opens up the horizon of further actions. Yet, as the word action suggests, the boy in our example must not be passive. He needs to invest physical and psychic energy in order to attain his goal of joining a new football club. Yet, he can rely on his complex network in assisting him to do this step that might frighten him. Different TEM diagrams might be compared one with the other such as when directly approaching a trainer and how beneficial such contact is. It might be the case that some young people prefer to join a club by means of being introduced by a close friend rather than to go all alone to a training where nobody knows him and that the second TEM diagram might result in higher dropout rates.Footnote 4 The TEM diagram shows illustratively that actions are always folded between past and future, yet this foldedness needs to be understood against the background of a person relating to his/her unique environment, subjectively. For some persons, it might not be a problem to go to a training without being introduced by a friend. Here, it would be interesting to investigate cultural factors that would explain these differences. The second boy, for example, might explain that his parents taught him early on to not being afraid of reaching out to other persons and that there is always more goodwill than one imagines to be. Here, the TEM diagrams are understood at the intersection of a personal action field within its overlap of other action fields (parental action fields) or in short within a unique social situatedness. The TEM diagrams do shed light onto this specific foldedness in time that is an important characteristic of personal and collective culture. Yet, temporality of being is only to be understood while getting a glimpse into the social structure of somebody’s action field (Fircks, 2021a, 2021b), longitudinally.

TEA: Evaluating a Cultural Example: Sleeping Issues

Having now clarified the TEA, we can now return to our sleeping issues example. How would we analyze such an everyday scenario? If culture is a function of an individual’s interpretation or relatedness against the background of his/her unique social situatedness in time, then we can be optimistic of tracking down this culture within our TEA. Let us imagine the following situation. Our individual verbalizes sleeping issues. The cultural psychological practitioner acknowledges the sleeping issues and decides to understand the person’s sleeping culture while visiting him in his everyday setting (see, for example, Smedslund & Ross, 2014 for headaches). Here, s/he decides to become a part of the individual’s personal culture in time in order to understand his/her situatedness in time. But let us now become practical.

After dinner at 8 p.m., our individual decides to watch television for 2 h. At 10 p.m., he gets hungry another time; he eats a sweet snack. From 10 to 11 p.m., the individual goes to bed. He begins to feel tired, yet he is not so tired that he falls asleep directly. That is why he decides to chat with his friends over the phone for one hour. All that happens in bed. Then, he puts his phone away and tries to fall asleep. Yet, it takes him another hour to fall asleep. The next day, our cultural psychological practitioner decides to not only observe our individual in the evening but to ask him several questions at specific points in time. After watching television, for example, our practitioner asks the individual how do you feel? Do you feel tired? Do you feel aroused? The individual might answer somewhat aroused. Our practitioner tries to go deeper and asks him if that is the reason why the individual chats with his friends over the phone. Hesitantly, the individual nods. Asking the individual how he feels after using the phone for another hour, he asks aroused and tired. Going deeper, the cultural psychological practitioner asks if there are any other feelings that bother the individual while trying to go to sleep. The individual nods another time. He feels heavy. He feels an overload of food. Asking how long this feeling lasts usually, the individual said the whole evening and that this feeling even bothers him in bed. He said it is a feeling as if he had stones in his stomach. The cultural psychological practitioner nods and draws the following TEM diagram concerning the individual’s eating habits that relate to his sleep (see Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
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TEM of eating late in the evening

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Him eating late in the evening makes him feel heavy and full. These feelings are rather uncomfortable for the individual and they do not cease for the next hours. On the contrary, they accompany him during the whole process of trying to get to sleep. The cultural psychological practitioner knows that past, present and future are related based upon the individual’s relatedness towards an issue at stake. Changing the relatedness towards an object, changes the way how he organizes himself and his environment in time. It is here that s/he suggests, for example, to eat two hours earlier or to eat a lighter dish while observing how the individual feels during the course of the evening.Footnote 5

Yet, the individual’s eating culture was only one issue that bothered his sleep, ongoingly. The individual’s very own sleeping culture was another issue. Him watching television late in the evening made him feel aroused. He used to watch thrillers. It was this arousal that made him feel not tired. That is why he used his smartphone another hour in order to wait passively to become tired. Yet, asking the individual after using his smartphone how he feels, he answered another time aroused. Accompanied by this arousal, he tried to fall asleep. Our cultural psychological practitioner becomes again curious how the individual might change his relatedness in time in order to improve his very own sleeping culture. S/he suggests reading a book while closely observing how the individual feels afterwards. He answers more relaxed. Yet, in order to improve this feeling of relaxation, the practitioner suggests doing a breathing meditation in bed. Asking the individual how he feels afterwards, he answers another time relaxed. It is this relaxation that helped him then to fall asleep sooner and to not wake up regularly during the night (see Fig. 6).

Fig. 6
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Team of being aroused in the evening

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The Re-appropriation of the Past

The fictitious TEMs show the following. The past is irreversible (Valsiner, 2017, 2019). If it occurs, it occurred. Yet, my relatedness towards an object or issue at stake—in past—changes the way how I interact with exactly that object in present and future (Sato & Tanimura, 2016). Changing my relatedness in time means re-structuring my personal culture in time. Here, I do re-appropriate the past in order to build a new present and future for myself. My unique social situated relatedness in time is not something fixed like a picture on a wall. It is rather something that is openly structural. If I change the way how I do relate to my environment in time, I change my personal culture. Yet, we can track down whether this change does any good for the individual or in other term if it helps him to relate to his environment in a more adaptive way. This new adaptive relatedness might then be more appropriate to satisfy a specific need that was priorly only poorly met.

The TEMs for our fictitious example show something highly valuable that is important to not come into a cultural relativism. Not every culture helps the individual to meet a specific need or helps him only to meet this need in maladaptive terms. There are specific cultures that are more adequate to satisfy a need or goal at stake; and another unique social relatedness in time might result in negative outcomes for the individual. It is important for the cultural psychological practitioner to understand that culture can be evaluated, normatively in a way whether it helps the individual to meet his needs in adaptive ways or in more maladaptive terms. Yet, even if the individual realizes that he relates to his environment in maladaptive ways, that does not mean that his personal culture is fixed, eternally. On the contrary, this maladaptive relatedness in time is an appeal for the individual as well as the practitioner to alter this relatedness while observing if another culture—that needs to be born—helps the individual to meet his pressing needs, more adequately (Perls et al., 2000). This is an empowering stance of cultural psychology as individuals might—with external help for instance—change the way how they interact with the environment or with themselves in order to meet their unique needs in more adaptive terms. Meaning making within our everyday occurrence is then something that does not happen passively but is rather an appeal for the individual to be responsible for their own relatedness in time.

It is here that we do see a connection between TEA and Bruner’s Alltagspsychologie. Bruner explained that his cultural psychology is based upon a narrative mode of being in time (1990, 1996). Every narrative includes an individual (actor) verbalizing specific needs and goals. Yet, this need or goal pursue is rendered difficult because of the cultural setting (canonical knowledge)—including norms, scripts, appeals, and so forth—which the individual actually needs to transcend in order to lead a meaningful and responsible life. The TEM diagrams have shown the connection between TEA and Bruner illustratively as they could decipher how individuals relate to an object (or to themselves) against the background of their cultural setting (how is sleep organized) which either helps them to attain their goals or makes this goal pursue hard. The TEM diagrams do always show an alternative narrative (alternative relatedness) mode of being that could be embraced and adopted in order to enrich personal culture. It shows the power of another cultural setting that could alter the relatedness of an individual which changes the way how s/he might interact with himself/herself and his/her environment. Hence, TEA and Bruner’s Alltagspsychologie are not only reconcilable with each other, but they are actually symbiotically intertwined. What for TEA is semiotic relatedness is for Bruner a narrative mode of being in time that organizes the life of a specific person or group. TEA—even if developed from another cultural psychological background—can be regarded as a potential way of materializing Bruner’s Cultural Psychology.

TEA and Its Appeal for Interventions

In other words, the TEA is an important cultural tool that helps practitioners to understand our cultural equation, validly. Yet, the TEA—as the name suggests—is more than a simple tool to understand an individual’s relatedness in time against the background of his/her social situatedness. The TEA comes always with opposite trajectories. Feeling aroused, for example, comes always with a possibility of feeling relaxed. Sleeping issues always come with the opportunity of falling asleep, calmly. Thus, the TEA is more than a simple cultural tool to understand social relatedness in time; it is a tool that shows equally possible ways of altering culture in time. It is henceforth a cultural intervention tool, too. As trajectories always come with their opposites, the cultural psychological practitioner gets concrete ideas how an individual’s culture might be altered adaptively if the individual were to show a maladaptive relatedness in time. The TEA is therefore a wholistic research approach that does not only help individuals and practitioners to understand their unique social situatedness and its interpretation in time but is equally a point of departure for possible alterations of culture that need to be born, responsibly and autonomously by the respective individual. Such a research tool—or method—are rare in the social sciences. Yet, it does justice to human beings moving in time and structuring and re-structuring constantly their personal culture.

It is a huge advantage that Alltagspsychologie can rely on such a method in order to understand how human beings relate to specific objects in time while having the opportunity to decipher changes within this relatedness. With the TEM diagrams, not only individuals and practitioners can analyze, for example, a specific sleep culture but every human social situated relatedness in time including work, family, friends, and leisure culture—among many others. The benefits of the TEM diagrams hide themselves in the fact of flexibly applying the model to all scientific inquiries of our everyday occurrence. Eating breakfast with my very own family or doing homework after school with my children are, for example, everyday phenomena that are necessarily cultural and unfold specific systemic consequences for multiple actors implied. A cultural Alltagspsychologie relying on the TEA can analyze such phenomena wholly while being able to show opportunities for change.

TEA and Its Transparency

Such a cultural Alltagspsychologie can be also considered valid in terms of its general scientific inquiry. The reason why hides itself in its very own transparency. With the TEM diagrams, different practitioners might replicate the cultural psychological investigation while becoming aware of their research participants relating differently to the issue at stake or while building upon another practitioner’s results. Replication means in this regard to not replicate the same findings. Within a cultural psychological Alltagspsychologie this is not possible (remember the past is irreversible and how can an irreversible past be replicated?). The human social situated relatedness is a unique phenomenon that cannot be generalized or merged with the culture of other people. Yet, a cultural psychological practitioner might replicate the scientific approach becoming aware how a specific person or group relates to an object such as sleep—in time and socially. If he shows the consequences that emerge for a system (parents, partner) within this relatedness, he has replicated a cultural psychological research approach that analyzes culture, openly. Replication means in this regard being able to validly decipher social-situated relatedness with all its ecological or systemic consequences for multiple actors implied (Graumann, 1984; Lang, 1988, 1992, 1993). Such a research approach can be considered valid as we understand dynamic agents moving in dynamic time. By this altered definition of validity, we overcome a previous narrow-minded approach to the criterion of validity. Again, bearing in mind that validity is the accordance of our empirical measurement with a logical measurement concept, we need to say that cultural phenomena are openly structured meaning that they develop over time. If they develop over time and do change due to significant interactions with other phenomena (Maruyama, 1974), we cannot fix phenomena with a statistical toolkit but need to do justice to the open nature of people and their (cultural) environments, in time. I am convinced that this is a more realistic picture of an accordance between empirical measurement and a logical measurement concept. Again, replication in its classical understanding is in this regard not possible—the reason for the replication crisis in psychology—but we can unravel the transformation of a (cultural) phenomenon over time with the proposed cultural methodology.

During the review process, important questions were raised concerning my concept of Alltagspsychologie and its measurement in contrast to critical psychology and activity theory that provide us with a distinct approach to everyday phenomena. I agree with that. Yet, activity theory—and critical psychology as its sibling—are unfortunately coming with a Marxist overcoat that does interpret any difference in culture as class differences that should be reversed (see, for example, Leontʹev, 1978). While this is true for certain kinds of phenomena as shown by Luria (1976), some differences must not be regarded as class differences and signs of oppression but that do make up for the diversity and hence the beauty of life. It is within particular differences that we do enrich our personal culture or its personal sense and can adapt ourselves to an ever-changing environment. Denying those differences is denying the pluralistic nature of human beings that is not prone to class differences. My extended concept of Alltagspsychologie does not rely on that Marxist overcoat and shows a different approach to fundamental differences in culture that can be regarded as positive—in many cases.

Moreover, it was asked how I explain the use of TEA within practitioner-oriented interventions. TEA is mostly based upon the participant’s experience. Thus, the participant and his experience are at the core of the real, imagined, and opposite trajectories. Hence, the question emerges how TEA can be used for a cultural-psychological practitioner without superimposing the practitioner’s experience onto the study participant. After all, we are interested in assessing a specific microculture of our participant and not the interpretation of the practitioner. Elsewhere, I have described that understanding culture and its ambivalent stimuli (folded between past and future) can only happen by ethnographic methods (Freiherr von Fircks, 2022b). By that I mean the combination of TEM and ethnographic go-along methods (Kusenbach, 2008) studying the microgenetic interaction between people and their cultural environment. In such a qualitative wholistic research design, we are immerging into the action field of our participant; we join his culture and most importantly the experience of his culture. Several premises are important for such a combination; we need to assess processual relatedness or in other terms a stream of cultural motion (Freiherr von Fircks, 2022a) that can only be understood if we get a glimpse into the person’s cultural habitat and his dynamic interactions with his environment (Freiherr von Fircks, 2022b). These interactions need to be paired with introspective methods that do capture the stream of consciousness of our participants that is folded between past, present, and future (or in other words what was, what is, and what could be) and is actualized and re-actualized constantly by the discovery of new cultural environments including people (Bachtin, 2017; Valsiner, 2017). Thus, a cultural-psychological practitioner works at the intersection of introspection and extrospection that can be accounted for in a wholistic research design relying on TEA and ethnographic methodology. A valid Alltagspsychologie tries to incorporate those aspects.

Conclusion: Pathing the Way for a Valid Cultural Alltagspsychologie

In the very beginning of the present paper, I have presented the idea that psychology must not analyze everyday interactions. Mainstream psychology advocates an understanding of valid research that tries to control specific variables in specific settings. Everyday interactions are argued to be not psychologically analyzable as researchers might not control variables nor the specific setting. This is the reason why psychology students are told not act upon their interests, scientifically and hence to not psychologically investigate human phenomena within their everyday occurrence. Validity is becoming here an ideology that neglects phenomena that are part and parcel of human living—day by day. And even if there are some disciplines in psychology that are brave enough to analyze those everyday interactions, their methodological toolkits are not adequate to analyze phenomena that develop over time, constantly.

Alltagspsychologie is the answer to this neglection (as well as insufficiency) and tries to analyze phenomena that are part of the daily human living. Its broad focus of interest is the human being operating within his action field that is structured by needs and goals. Meeting these needs and goals is performed within the individual’s unique culture. Culture is argued to be a function C(f) = IV, USS, TB, thus a person’s unique, social relatedness in time. Every specific kind of relatedness unfolds consequences for the individual himself/herself as well as for his/her environment, from past to future. Yet, this past is irreversible. However, this does not mean that the individual cannot change his/her relatedness towards his/her very own past in the next present moment—re-appropriating the past for a cultural change in the present and future. Culture is hence something openly structured and constantly re-structured.

Yet, in order for a science to advance, we are inclined to build up specific methods that do enhance the transparency of our scientific inquiry. Researchers as well as participants need to understand how research comes into being. This does not mean that results are replicated one to one but that basic cultural experiments can be replicated in order to investigate similarities, differences or transformations of a present research object. The TEM diagrams are argued to be such a transparent, cultural psychological research tool that can analyze personal culture in time.

However, the TEA is more than a simple tool to decipher the development of culture as well as its alteration; it does produce simultaneously interventions if a specific person shows maladaptive forms of relatedness towards his environment or himself. The insights that come with opposite trajectories can be used to show another form of personal culture—to be appropriated—that might help the person to satisfy his need or goal more appropriately. Such an approach can be called empowering and helps individuals to grow in life, constantly and to actualize their being in time, or in other words their personal culture. A specific sort of Alltagspsychologie is appealed to rely on the TEM diagrams as they unravel more than a simple social situated relatedness of a person but comes with developmental opportunities for multiple persons implied.

I appeal interested readers—mostly students, and we are all students in life—to acknowledge the benefits of Alltagspsychologie. Interesting fields of inquiry emerge such as, for example, how we do relate to the issue of sleep, culturally and which trajectories might emerge that help us to address a specific sleeping issue, situationally and wholly. I am convinced that such a scientific perspective and that such a specific sort of cultural Alltagspsychologie is serving the individual based upon his needs and goals that are part and parcel of his everyday life. I have presented an equation as well as a method that can capture the development of culture as well as potential interventions. Such a scientific inquiry can be not only called valid but scientifically important.