Summary
The question as to which dimensions or units of analysis should be employed in psychological theory and research is an issue that, despite its crucial nature, has yet to be resolved. In this paper, the many units of analysis that psychologists have to choose from are examined in terms of types. Units concerned with motivation, labelled A units, and units concerned with the structure of behavior, labelled B units, are suggested as two general unit types. A units, such as need or personal construct, and B units, such as serial or trait, appear to be employed together in the enterprise of describing and explaining human action. In order to choose an acceptable or adequate pair of analytic units, two sets of evaluative criteria are proposed. Idiothetic focus, integrative emphasis, parsimonious explanation, and stability-change flexibility are proposed tentatively as criteria for judging the adequacy of A units; while ecological representativeness, middle-level perspective, operationalizability, systemic relevance, and temporal extension are proposed as evaluative criteria for B units. Assumptions and implications of such a unit types and their evaluative criteria are discussed.
The author would like to thank J. Clarke, G. Morgan, and D. Stout for helpful comment on an earlier version of this paper
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Horley, J. (1988). The Units of Analysis Problem in Psychology: An Examination and Proposed Reconciliation. In: Baker, W.J., Mos, L.P., Rappard, H.V., Stam, H.J. (eds) Recent Trends in Theoretical Psychology. Recent Research in Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3902-4_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3902-4_18
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