| Sumario: | The discipline of psychology has struggled with its identity as a qualitative mode of inquiry and a quantitative science for more than a century. Early psychologists, such as James, Wundt, Freud, and Jung relied heavily on introspection and self-report as their sources of data. With the rise of Behaviorism and its espousal of logical positivism, psychology emerged as a quantitative enterprise that wore the mantle of numerical objectivity. Modern psychology has suffered from the polarization of these modes of inquiry. Qualitative researchers view quantitative researchers as cold and reductionistic while quantitative researchers view their qualitative colleagues as warm, sincere, and hopelessly unscientific. By using research examples from clinical, personality, developmental, and industrial psychology, the current talk will attempt to bridge the gap by showing how personal meanings of experienced time, space, emotions, and interpersonal relationships can be potentially quantifiable in ways that make sense to both humanists and scientists.
|
|---|