Emerging Methods in Psychology

Seth Surgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351297103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The motivation for this volume in the History and Theory of Psychology series is to look across sub-disciplines within psychology and highlight instances where researchers transcended the tendency to think about methodology along traditional lines. Contributors have located examples of researchers who built upon existing ideas to create methods true to their interests and theoretical convictions.

Emerging Methods in Psychology shows how a discipline creates new methods and carves out possibilities that not only generate data, but also advance knowledge of human psychological functioning. It concentrates on showcasing the possibilities that exist when the researcher focuses on the relationship between theory, method, and data.

The question of what kind of expertise is required is a key issue. This is particularly the case in psychology where the tradition of standardizing methods over the last century has served to stabilize research questions. Knowledge creation is deeply affective and ambiguous rather than the secure accumulation of data by a socially legitimized procedure. This innovative volume moves beyond psychology as social engineering into new varieties of social knowledge.

1

Using Diaries and Self-Writings as Data in Psychological Research

Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie

Good science is based on good data. Psychologists as empirical scientists believe that producing and collecting data is an important phase of their work. However, producing and collecting data can take various forms, requiring more or less control over the phenomenon at stake. Experimentation has long been considered the most scientific method available to researchers because it entails the systematic manipulation of variables and assessment of the consequences. This strategy soon became a condition for science, and hence, “the complete scholar is the one that masters both the theory and the practice of the experimental method” (Bernard 1865/1963, 51, our translation). Observation also requires the active involvement of researchers as they create situations, develop techniques for gathering observations, and turn these observations into data. From this perspective, experimentation and observation belong to a continuum, from the most fully controlled experimental situation, to more naturalistic and less controlled contexts for observation (Deconchy 2008); yet, in any case the data is produced by the expertise of the researcher. If the quality of researchers is measured by their ability to create complex situations that will trigger specific behavior, which then will be treated as data, then a researcher that skips this stage in his work seems a very poor one.

However, researchers can start from a very different standpoint through considering material that has been produced independently of the action of researchers, such as newspapers, advertisements, official documents, etc. (Bauer and Gaskell 2000). As psychologists, it is documents informing about the self which interest us, such as diaries, autobiographies, or letters. Diaries seem to constitute a crystal simple material: people write regularly about their thoughts and actions, without the awareness of an audience. However, scholars’ reflection over the past years has shown the hidden complexity of diaries as data, to such an extent that one could write that

scholars (…) can be judged based on their ability to deal with diaries, which calls for attention to the form (or genre), context, and individual subject simultaneously. (Paperno 2004, 573)

This tension between differing claims for complexity in the mastery of research techniques reminds us that research is as much about identity and position as it is about the emergence of new knowledge (Valsiner 2007b; Zittoun et al. 2007). Yet, in science, the ultimate criteria for evaluating the contribution of a technique or a method, is whether or not it enables the gathering of facts that support a research question. No method is good in itself: it is good only in that it has some purpose (Rorty 1981). In that respect, diaries (and to some extent, other forms of self-writing) might offer an important source of data for the scholar interested in human development.

In this chapter we reflect on the use of self-writings and diaries as data in psychology. We first explain why we believe that self-writings offer very useful data for sociocultural research. Of course, we are not the first to think so; but studies grounded on such methods have been strangely overlooked in the mainstream. Therefore, drawing on current insights in sociocultural psychology, we examine the process by which a person’s experience is turned into a text. On this basis, we then propose some analytical strategies which enable the use of such texts as data informing us about psychological processes of sense making.

Why Work with Diaries or Self-Writings?

If the quality of a research method can be evaluated only in regard to a certain research question, within a theoretical framework, we have to start by defining our standpoint. We are sociocultural psychologists, interested in people acting, interacting, and developing within socio-cultural environments. Our work has a clear dialogical orientation, that is, we assume that thinking is developed through interaction with the social, material, and symbolic environment, and all this takes place in contexts structured by larger streams of social meaning (Marková 2003; Valsiner 2007b). Within this general framework, joining a large chorus of researchers, we realized the difficulty of capturing psychological change—that is, a modification in people’s understanding or acting in their changing environment. We came to identify four theoretical difficulties that have empirical implications and we found that we could solve them by engaging in research based on certain types of self-writings and diaries.

Firstly, if we assume after Bergson (2003) and James (1890), that human experience is inherently temporal, we also have to assume that change occurs all the time. How then to study “development”? If everything changes—the object of our research and also ourselves as researchers, how can we identify change? Is there more change in some moments than others? Classical authors answered this question by developing interests in extraordinary changes; irritation, accidents, situations that lead people to an adaptation or readjustment (Dewey 1910; Piaget 1974). This idea has been developed by systems theory as the idea of a “catastrophe”: either through the accumulation of small factors or drastic events there is a discontinuity in the continuous flow of change calling for a radical reorganization. In our work, it has thus appeared extremely fruitful to examine events perceived as ruptures in people’s lives. Such ruptures call for processes of adjustment, which can be called transitions (Baltes, Lindenberger, and Staudinger 1998; Zittoun et al. 2003).

Hence, if change is continuous, we propose the methodological strategy of studying ruptures and transitions, which offer natural windows on discontinuities in the continuous flow of change (Wagoner et al. 2011). This leads us naturally to look at narratives. Indeed, in our culture, narratives are classically triggered by, and organized around “incidents”: a “fabula”: a story is in that case the attempt to restore an order that has been disturbed by a “trouble” (Bruner 1990, 2003; Burke 1945; Propp 1968). Diaries, letters, and autobiographies do not escape this principle: the hidden assumption is mostly that “something” should happen for it to be written. Hence, it is not rare to see diarist writing that “nothing has happened”—revealing the expectation that diaries should record “happenings.” In this sense, diaries and autobiographical writings are spaces in which people narrate as they reflect upon events, and very often render particularly explicit ruptures and transitions.

A second point, following from the assumption that time irreversibly passes, is that consciousness itself is constantly changing. How can we capture something that constantly changes? One of the possible answers is to gather information which is constantly evolving. This might lead to the observation of longitudinal, real-time events. In our case, as we are interested in people’s continuous interpretation of their environment, self-writing offers an interesting entry here. Diaries, or correspondences, are written on a regular basis, and can thus follow the rhythm of events. Writing regularly about self, a person reports these events, describes them, and at times, reflects on them, or expresses feelings or related thoughts. The act of writing a diary or an autobiographic text might bring the person to new ideas and understandings concerning recent or past life events in the light of the present (Wiener and Rosenwald 1993). In this sense, the written self-reflective text of a diary or an autobiographical text can be seen as a form of externalization of the flow of consciousness. Hence, the study of self-writings opens a window onto the changeability of life in two senses: on the one hand, like diaries or regular correspondence, they can be close to daily events; on the other hand, they reveal the microprocesses of meaning-making engaged by the process of writing.

Thirdly, our theoretical framework renders visible the fact that human conduct is always dialogical—a reply to others, or an anticipation of their statements. The “others” significant for a person can be immediate, like peers and families, or part of a wider community. A society as a whole offers another level of “otherness” with whom each person has to deal. Communities and society often appears to the person as a collective “other,” although it might be organized around specific public figures; it comes to the person mainly through mediated means, that is, the radio, the press, internet, posters, etc. The otherness of society is mainly in dialogue with the person through semiotic means, although people are often not aware of this communication (e.g., people do not know why they find jeans cool, they just do). The empirical challenge following from such a statement is to identify data that captures the perspective of the person, but also her dialogue with immediate others, her interactions with a community, and her relationship with a broader society. In our case, we therefore found it important to identify the self-writings of not one, but two or more persons, living in the same environment and actually interacting on a daily basis. We also found it important to choose the self-writings of persons living in an immediate and more distant social environment that could be documented through different sources (historical documents, newspapers, diverse types or archives, etc.). This dialogicality of human experience also has implications at the level of understanding of the text itself, as we will see later.

The fourth issue we want to address is located at a metatheoretical level. We are aware of the apparent fragmentation of the field of social sciences and psychology in particular: researchers develop local theories; they work on specific datasets, but often they do not communicate with each other on the same issues or data. Local observations become incommensurable and knowledge can hardly become cumulative and integrated (Yurevich 2009). It seems to us that collaborative work in social sciences offer a good remedy against fragmentation, and can turn it into an occasion for development (Zittoun, Gillespie, and Cornish 2009). Collaborating on the analysis of the same data is one way in which research perspectives can be coordinated and thus mutually enriching. Collaborating on a shared dataset can be understood at two levels: at the first level a group of researchers with different theoretical orientations explicitly work together in a joint project on the same dataset. At the second level, the dataset on which researchers have worked can be accessible to any other researchers by being made publicly available. Diaries, autobiographical accounts, letters are often public data: they are published or they belong to a data archive or historical foundation. Using such publicly available data, can thus work against fragmentation in a double sense: by working as a group of researchers on the same dataset with different theoretical tools, and by enabling other researchers, through access to the data that we analyzed, to deepen, extend, critique or complete our analyses. If other researchers can access the primary data on which our analyses are based, we enhance transparency and possibly the quality of research (Gillespie 2005).

Historical Background

Psychological research has used people’s writings as data for a long time (e.g., Allport 1965). The history of using such material is partly linked to the history of studying biographies or lifelong development. However, authors in that field are not always explicit on the sources of their information, often a mixture of interviews, self-narrative, and writing. One very explicit psychological research based on self-writing is Sigmund Freud’s little considered book on President Wilson. In the book Thomas Woodrow Wilson, A psychological study (1967), Sigmund Freud collaborates with William C. Bullitt, an historian, to make a psychological analysis of the biography of President Wilson. In his introduction to the book, Bullitt notes that Freud was unsatisfied with his previous biographical attempts, on Da Vinci and Michelangelo, which were based on limited material. In contrast, the analysis of Wilson is based on the speeches and writings of Wilson, writings about Wilson, and the diaries of people living in daily proximity to the president (his secretary and best friends). Additionally, Bullitt and Freud gathered interviews, diaries, notes, and letters of various people who knew Wilson. The analysis has been described as a great collaboration between the two men, first through discussion, then each author writing some parts, the other editing and changing them, until both would accept the document. In its final form, the study is preceded by two editorials, one by Bullitt, the other by Freud, and by two chapters, a presentation of the biography of Wilson’s childhood and youth by Bullitt, and a “psychological portrait” by Freud. Although the two men do not propose a deep discussion of their method, we can observe the complex construction of the case study, the research of a diversity of sources and perspectives, and the collaborative analysis and knowledge construction process. Unfortunately, this writing by Freud and Bullitt has been overlooked in recent discussions (with the exception of Solms [2006]).

A later systematic use of self-writing material was made in the field of “psychohistory” or psychobiography. These approaches are rooted in personality psychology, and attempt to do psychological analysis of specific individuals on the basis of biographical information. These are also often based on analyses that consider the personality of a person as a relatively stable structure shaped by, but mainly conditioning, her life trajectory. In these cases, analyzing biographic material is used as a means to “analyse the person” in history, not about the development of the person. In some cases, of course, the ambition of authors is to elaborate more general theories about specific psychological processes (Gardner 1997; Magai and Haviland-Jones 2002) or about lifespan development (Erikson 1993a, 1993b). Often there is however no serious reflection on the nature of the data used to elaborate such analysis.

Only recently in the social sciences, diaries have become objects of reflection in qualitative research and education. It is both their qualities of being dynamic, and of offering narratives modes of externalization, which make diaries powerful research and teaching resources. In his research on the socialization to university, Coulon (2005) asked students to keep a diary, both as means to inform him about the transition they experienced, and for them to have a resource for facilitating the changes they were facing. Crème (2008) sees students’ journals as offering a sort of transitional space to “play” with new knowledge and to slowly inscribe it into a narrative which then can be integrated into self-identity. On the other hand, Janesick (1999) reflects on the use of the journal as a tool in qualitative research: for her, the researcher has much to gain from keeping a diary of his or her own research process, hence enriching the process itself, mainly by allowing self-reflection: “The written text of the journal evolves, is reshaped, and for the purposes of the researcher, becomes a way to clarify, reinterpret, and define much of our work” (Janesick 1999, 521). For her, such diaries can then become public, and thus a way to communicate about research as “a way to illuminate what the researcher is studying in a highly disciplined and deeply personal way” (Janesick 1999, 522).

If the researcher’s community seems to acknowledge the development potential of diaries and self-writing, there is still little reflection on the possibility of treating diaries and letters as data to learn about the narrator’s change and development. It is such reflection that we develop in the present chapter. In order to do so, we draw on recent ideas in the theory of narratives, discourse, and semiotic mediation. The aim is to give some theoretical grounding to the use of self-writings in social sciences and psychology.

Theoretical Grounding: Externalizing the Stream of Consciousness

Working with diaries or self-writings implies treating written text as data. The written text is supposed to give an entry to people’s thoughts and mental world. But to what extent? Can we believe that what we read is what the person once actually thought? How much is self-writing not always a form of self-fiction? There has been a lot of critical attention on these points in various disciplines of the social and human sciences (see, for instance, Auger 2006; Lejeune 1980). Here, we e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword: Methods, Methodology, and Meaning: Psychology’s Struggles in the Game of “Being a Science”
• Editors’ Introduction: Tension of the “Old” Brings about New Methods in Psychology
• 1. Using Diaries and Self-Writings as Data in Psychological Research
• 2. Rethinking Word Association
• 3. The Dialogical Self in Movement: Reflecting on Methodological Tools for the Study of the Dynamics of Change and Stability in the Self
• 4. A Dismantled Jigsaw: Making Sense of the Complex Intertwinement of Theory, Phenomena, and Methods
• 5. Who Shall Survive? Psychology that Replaces Quantification with Qualitative Mathematics
• 6. Researching Scientific Modeling: Language, the Missing Artifact
• General Conclusions: Coming Closer to the Phenomenon: Better Understanding the Process of Human Meaning-Making
• Contributors
• Index