Abstract
The crucial starting point for this book is the idea that methods are a sub-part of methodology that functions as a cycle and that it is in the coordination of all parts of the cycle that creating and using any particular method may make sense for knowledge creation. In this chapter I outline some ways in which such theory-based methods have been, and could be, created. The examples used come from traditional personality questionnaires. How can we study the reality of the phenomenon described in that (or any other) one personality test item? This is the crucial issue for all of psychological methods—they need to establish access to basic psychological processes that can be studied on the basis of any single instance (see elaboration in the chapter). Traditional personality questionnaires are filled with valuable materials about the phenomena under study. It is another matter that as methods they remain inconsequential. Examples of constructing relevant methods (TEA) are given. The focus on constructing methods that entail movement is outlined.
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- 1.
Some of such encounters that trigger intense affective meaning escalations are very small features of a routine of the particular social place that trigger the notion of BOTHERING DEMAND in the person. A Polish exchange student to the United States reported hating the act of going to a supermarket for food. The single reason—after she has finished paying, the cashier every time told her “And you have a nice day!”, an act of ritualistic social courtesy; the cashier really would not care what kind of day the Polish girl was having— became a demand that bothered her so dramatically that she tried to avoid going to supermarkets, or to escape from the cashier’s counter as quickly as possible, to prevent the bothersome demand that she should have a “nice day.”
- 2.
Some efforts in this direction are notable. Different modeling efforts to look at development—those of Paul van Geert’s experimental theoretical psychology (van Geert 1998) and Tatsuya Sato’s Trajectory Equifinality Model (TEM) described below—touch upon the potential for developing pre-factum-based methods.
- 3.
Isolda Gunther (2008) has documented the various ritualistic entrance strategies she had to go through doing her research in the United States with university students from different countries and their different interpretations of who is to work with whom and record what in these encounters. These rituals are further accentuated by institutional interventions into the research encounter in the form of various “ethics approvals” and “consent forms.”
- 4.
Remembering in conflictual settings—such as in family conflict—can involve active efforts of the co-rememberer’s to not recall a relevant act (e.g., the act of mother hitting the daughter, where the father insists this did not happen—Musaeus and Brinkmann 2011, p. 53).
- 5.
In contrast to variability constriction—the assumption that has been inserted into the social sciences through the axiomatic insistence of the “natural order”—of normal, Gaussian distribution as a given, all the habit of homogenization of heterogeneous classes is based on the consideration of the average as the representative of the constricted version of normal distribution. Variability amplification is the opposite process that moves outwards from the normal distribution and generates ever-new forms that may expand the distribution and alter its form.
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Valsiner, J. (2017). The Role of Methods in the Methodology Cycle. In: From Methodology to Methods in Human Psychology . SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61064-1_5
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