The Individual Subject and Scientific Psychology

Transcription

1 The Individual Subject and Scientific Psychology

2 PERSPECTIVES ON INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES CECIL R. REYNOLDS, Te}C.as A&M University, College Station ROBERT T. BROWN, University of North Carolina, Wilmington DETERMINANTS OF SUBSTANCE ABUSE Biological, Psychological, and Environmental Factors Edited by Mark Galizio and Stephen A. Maisto HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Edited by John A. Glover and Royce R. Ronning THE INDIVIDUAL SUBJECT AND SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY Edited by Jaan Valsiner THE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES A Developmental Perspective Edited by Lawrence C. Hartlage and Cathy F. Telzrow PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES A Natural Science Approach Hans J. Eysenck and Michael W. Eysenck PERSONALITY DIMENSIONS AND AROUSAL Edited by Jan Strelau and Hans J. Eysenck PERSPECTIVES ON BIAS IN MENTAL TESTING Edited by Cecil R. Reynolds and Robert T. Brown A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher.

3 The Individual Subject and Scientific Psychology Edited by J aan Valsiner University af North Carolina Chapel Hill, North Carolina SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC

4 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Individual subject and scientific psychology. (Perspectives on individual differences) Includes bibliographies and index. 1. Single subject research. 2. Psychology Research. I. Valsiner, Jaan. II. Series. [DNLM: 1. Individuality. 2. Psychology. BF ] BF76.6.S56I / ISBN ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Plenum Press, New York in 1986 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1986 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher

5 Contributors ROBERT B. CAIRNS, Developmental Psychology Program, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina BARBARA CARROLL, Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada JANE DVWAN, Department of Psychiatry, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada ISAAC FRANCK, Late of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Center for Bioethics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC MARY GAUVAIN, Department of Human Development, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania HERBERT P. GINSBURG, Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York KLAus E. GROSSMANN, Institut fur Psychologie, Lehrstuhl IV, Universitiit Regensburg, Regensburg, Federal Republic of Germany THOMAS R. KRATOCHWILL, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin F. CHARLES MACE, School Psychology Program, School of Education, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania v

6 vi CONTRIBUTORS BARBARA ROGOFF, Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah SIDNEY J. SEGALOWITZ, Department of Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada EVELYN B. THOMAN, Department of Biobehavioral Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut WARREN THORNGATE, Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada JMN VALSINER, Developmental Psychology Program, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina PETER WALSCHBURGER, Institut fur Psychologie, Freie UniversiUit Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany

7 Preface The aim of this book is to bring together scientists from different fields in psychology who are concerned about the gradual disappearance over the past decades of the treatment of individual subjects as viable sources of scientific generalizations in our discipline. Each of the contributors to the present volume brings into it her or his unique (individual!) perspective on the issue of how psychology's inference making based on individual subjects can be constructed. Partially because of the leanings of the present editor, developmental psychologists are particularly well represented in the book. However, this book is oriented toward crossing subdiscipline boundaries in psychology-the contributions coming from researchers in social psychology, behavior analysis, neuropsychology, and psychophysiology illustrate that psychologists working in these different fields have to struggle with the difficulty of thinking about individual subjects in ways that would retain the qualities of the phenomena under study. Since the beginning of this century, psychologists have tried to capture the individuality of the people they work with in two opposite ways. First, their thinking has often moved toward discarding individuality as "noise" in the process of making generalizations, by averaging it out or replacing it by prototypical individual types of psychological phenomena. Second, differential psychology has turned the vice of individuality into the virtue for interindividual comparative research. In either case, the more relevant question-how is the psychologicaljimctioning of the whole range of different individual subjects organized?-has largely remained beyond the area of thought in which scientific psychology has been operating. The roots of this difficulty of thinking about individual subjects are, of course, far beyond the boundaries of our discipline-they may be vii

8 viii PREFACE located in the traditions of occidental philosophical thought and in the realm of dominant forms of social life in rapidly industrializing Western societies, in which many of the psychological issues have become "problems" that are given to specially educated experts-psychologists-to solve. Because the education of experts to deal with socially relevant issues is necessarily society-bound, psychologists' thinking about the role of individual subjects in the scientific inference of general psychological principles is guided by certain assumptions that have effectively narrowed down the experts' thinking. The present volume is a collective attempt to deal with some of the basic issues of psychological thought that have complicated psychologists' thinking about individual subjects. The contributors also suggest different solutions to overcome the epistemological hurdles of considering individual subjects in their areas of research. However, the coverage of the issues in the present volume purposefully refrains from direct, cookbook-like directions as to how one should study individual subjects in the fields of psychology represented in the book. Instead, the volume is expected to provide intellectual nutrition to those readers who want to know how one could, in principle, construct new methods of analysis of individual-subject phenomena in psychology. Psychology's major problem, in my opinion, has been the trivialization of epistemological problems of research through quick and uncritical acceptance of different formalized systems of data analysis without careful scrutiny of their axiomatic background, and without a thorough evaluation of the fit between these methods with the important aspects of psychological phenomena that psychologists wish to study. The idea of compiling this book occurred to me a couple 'of years ago, when I compared the presentation of what was being referred to as "data" in different established child psychology journals of 1930s and 1980s. It became evident from the comparison that, despite cautionary outcries over these decades, the presentation of empirical information as data that preserve the systemic integrity of psychological issues in individual subjects has gradually waned and been replaced by certain abstractions with little connection to their underlying reality. This psychological reality occurs in a variety of individually structured forms, whereas the habitual way of the representing these forms as scientific data are often limited to the presentation of group averages, or sometimes even only to statements that a certain "effect" (tested by analyses ofvariance) appeared to be statistically Significant. Empirical psychology, in its striving towards increased accumulation of data, may have actually eliminated the reality that remains behind the data from its consideration. This quite unhappy realization led me to undertake the project that has

9 PREFACE ix resulted in the present volume, making both its strengths and weaknesses available publicly to interested readers. A number of people contributed to the preparation of this volume. First, the enthusiasm of the contributors and their coping with editorimposed deadlines has made working on the book interesting and not frustrating, and all the contributors deserve the editor's gratitude for their contributions. Second, Robert Brown, the co-editor ofthe series in which this book appears, was helpful in providing critical feedback to the editor and the contributors. Basil Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., and the editor of the Journalfor the Theory aj'8ocial Behaviour, Paul F. Secord, gave kind permission to reprint the only contribution to the volume (Franck's contribution-chapter 1) that had been previously published in that journal. The Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis are thanked for their permission to reproduce figures used in Chapter 6 (by Mace & Kratochwill). Mrs. Vicki R. Gray's help with typing of different parts of the volume is acknowleged with gratitude. JAAN V ALSINER

10 Contents INTRODUCTION Where is the Individual Subject in Scientific Psychology? Jaan Valsiner 1 PART I INDMDUAL-BASED INFERENCE METHDOLOGY: PAST, PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE CHAPI'ER1 Psychology as a Science: Resolving the Idiographic-Nomothetic Controversy Isaac Franck CHAPTER 2 From Idiographic Approaches to Nomothetic Hypotheses: Stem, Allport, and the Biology of Knowledge, Exemplified by an Exploration of Sibling Relationships Klaus E. Grossmann CHAPI'ER3 The Production, Detection, and Explanation of Behavioral Patterns Warren Thorngate xi

11 xii CONTENTS PART II GROUP VERSUS INDMDUAL-BASED INFERENCE IN PSYCHOLOGY: LOGIC AND PRACTICE CHAPTER 4 Phenomena Lost: Issues in the Study of Development Robert B. Cairns 97 CHAPTER 5 Between Groups and Individuals: Psychologists' and Laypersons' Interpretations of Correlational Findings Jaan Valsiner CHAPTER 6 The Individual Subject in Behavior Analysis Research F. Charles Mace and Thomas R. Kratochwill 153 CHAPTER 7 The Time Domain in Individual Subject Research Evelyn B. Thoman 181 CHAPTER 8 Ordinal Pattern Analysis: A Strategy for Assessing Hypotheses about Individuals Warren Thorngate and Barbara Carroll PART III TOWARD THE STUDY OF INDMDUAL SUBJECTS: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM DIFFERENT FIELDS IN PSYCHOLOGY CHAPTER 9 Academic Diagnosis: Contributions from Developmental Psychology Herbert P. Ginsburg CHAPTER 10 A Method for the Analysis of Patterns, Illustrated with Data on Mother-Child Instructional Interaction Barbara Rogoff and Mary Gauvain

12 CONTENTS xiii CHAPTER 11 The Role of the Case Study in Neuropsychological Research 291 Jane Dywan and Sydney J. Segalowitz CHAPTER 12 Psychophysiological Activation Research: An Approach to Assess Individual Stress Reactions? Peter Walschburger CHAPTER 13 Sequence-Structure Analysis: Study of Serial Order within Unique Sequences of Psychological Phenomena Jaan Valsiner EPIWGUE Different Perspectives on Individual-Based Generalizations in Psychology Jaan Valsiner Index