Umeå University's logo

Much contemporary psychology is characterized by a natural science epistemology that overlooks the richness of human experience. This book offers a timely and necessary critique and emphasizes a conception of human beings as persons embedded in relationships, cultural groups, and historical contexts. Eva Magnusson and Jeanne Marecek provide strategies for critical reflective scrutiny of contemporary psychological theories and practices. Using ‘styles of thinking’ as one of their conceptual tools, they investigate whether, and how, theories, research methods, and debates across subfields such as cognition, language, and psychopathology take people’s situatedness into account. The book gives readers practical guidance for conceptual analysis, and a set of questions for scrutinizing other subfields and practices. It also describes research methods and projects based on a view of humans as situated persons. The book offers both a philosophical foundation and a hands-on guide to a psychology with persons at its center.

A key goal of feminists in psychology has been to understand and challenge social relations of inequality, privilege, and oppression. Several orienting assumptions of mainstream psychology present obstacles to achieving this goal. For example, one assumption is internalism—focusing on inner motives, traits, and capacities as the determinants of human behaviour, while ignoring the sociocultural context. Another is universalism—the assumption that psychological theories and explanations can hold for all people everywhere and at all times. The chapter also reviews the history of feminism in psychology and provides an overview of methods and practices utilized by feminist psychologists.

Qualitative inquiry is a family of research approaches that seek in-depth understanding of people and their social worlds. Researchersusually gather verbal material, such as talk or written texts. The procedures used to gather material are flexible, enabling the researcher to adapt them to individual participants. Different types of analysis are used, depending on the researcher's theoretical framework and the questions under investigation.

Qualitative inquiry has long had a presence in psychology, from founders such as William James and Wilhelm Wundt in the 19th century, to personality researchers such as Gordon Allport in the 1930s. However, the development of qualitative inquiry has been slower in psychology than in other social sciences; a fact that is best understood in the context of the general history of the psychologydiscipline in the West. Some characteristics of this context that slowed the development of qualitative inquiry in psychology were therestriction of science to mean natural science; the imperative to restrict psychological research to quantitative methods and measurement; the refusal of psychology journals to publish research using qualitative methods; and the often vociferously expressed contempt for psychologists who used these methods. 

Since the 1970s, larger societal changes, combined with intellectual developments in neighboring disciplines, have made an increasing number of psychologists aware of the merits and possibilities of using qualitative methods to answer their research questions. This increased interest has resulted in a rich and growing flora of methods of gathering and analyzing data, an increase in venues for publishing qualitative research in psychology, and the founding of several nation-wide as well as cross-national organizations of qualitative researchers in psychology. However, qualitative inquiry remains a marginal set of approaches within the discipline. These approaches are very seldom taught in standard courses of research methods. 

This chapter lays the groundwork for navigating psychological scholarship on gender, sex, and sexualities. It presents some central concepts in these fields, as well as tools for thinking about and asking questions about these concepts and their use. The chapter begins with a discussion of social categories and categorization and then moves to a focus on sex categories. Next is an examination of three concepts that psychologists employ with great frequency, but with varying and sometimes ambiguous meanings: gender, difference, and "the social." The closing section offers a series of questions to guide students as they read books and articles on gender, sex, and sexualities.

A key goal of feminists in psychology has been to understand and challenge social relations of inequality, privilege, and oppression. Several orienting assumptions of mainstream psychology present obstacles to achieving this goal. For example, one assumption is internalism — focusing on inner motives, traits, and capacities as the determinants of human behaviour, while ignoring the sociocultural context. Another is universalism — the assumption that psychological theories and explanations can hold for all people everywhere and at all times. The chapter also reviews the history of feminism in psychology and provides an overview of methods and practices utilized by feminist psychologists.

How do emotions enter into children’s negotiated understandings and situated uses of categories of identity? This question guided a revisit to an ethnographic study of a multi-cultural context in Oakland, California. A focus group discussion among four Chinese American girls just graduating from elementary school and an interviewer, also Chinese American, was chosen for closer study. This secondary analysis focuses on how the girls engaged in school events and how in the interview they shared experiences of being excluded and rejected by peers. Thus, both reports about life in school and lived life in the group discussion were analyzed in ways that followed the girls’ individual and collective emotional dynamics. Emotional tension between using and being used by categories drove their stories about belonging, exclusion and subordination, and resistance. The girls’ handling of social identities in relation to language use, required activities, and girly appearance in school demonstrated how they were able to draw on an eclectic and intersecting mix of categories. In the containing setting of the focus group, the girls processed their raw emotional experience of being taunted and humiliated. In the process they could challenge and destabilize the meanings attached to the categories of identity used against them. Therefore, intersectional analyses cannot take any specific meanings of social categories such as gender, ethnicity/race, and age, as the starting points. Rather, in each specific instance, the meanings of social categories will emerge as the results of the analysis.