Narrative Methodology

Abstract

As has been discussed previously, the emergence and development of psychology as a scientific discipline was deeply intertwined with the culture of modernism. As Polkinghorne poignantly observes, ‘The story of academic psychology is a subplot within the story of modernism. Psychology as an academic discipline originated as a purposeful effort to apply the epistemological principles of Enlightenment science to the study of human beings’ (Polkinghorne 1992: 146). This had significant implications for methodological issues in psychology, both for methodology as the theoretical underpinning of research on the one hand, and as methods and techniques employed to collect and analyse data on the other. The ideal of knowledge and the scientific character of the discipline have been closely bound up with the model of experimental science borrowed from the natural sciences. Despite the widespread revision of what constitutes knowledge that has taken place in the Humanities through poststructural and postmodern critiques, academic psychology has remained committed to some significant assumptions and maxims of modernism. Unlike many other scientific practices that have become consciously aware of their location within a historical paradigm, to a large degree as a result of incorporating Kuhn’s (1962) insight, psychology has been slow to acknowledge the situated character of knowledge. Gergen (2001) highlights several modern assumptions that continue to shape the understanding and practice of psychology: the centrality of individual knowledge, the assumption of the world as objectively given, and the understanding of language as a carrier of truth. These views are clearly discernible in academic psychology in the broadly shared assumptions that ‘(a) mental processes are available for objective study […], (b) mental processes are related in a causal manner to environment inputs on the one hand and to behavioural consequences on the other, and (c) the experimental method is superior to all others in capturing these causal relationships’ (Gergen 2001: 805). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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