The vitality and generativity of APA’s Division of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods were evident at the recent APA Convention in Washington, DC. The research and persons on which our Division bestowed awards could not be more diverse and impressive. Assuming the position of President of the division was a special pleasure for me given our newly established tradition to deliberately engage the Presidential Trio in planning initiatives. Alex Beaujean's (past-past-President) influence continues as Debbi Bandalos (Past President), Rachel Fouladi (President-elect), and I continue to increase communication and collaboration with the Division's Executive Committee. There is excitement about the continuation of our Mentor Program, a new Salon Series, the prospect of Division publication on psychological methodology, a possible grant or award in the area of mixed methods, and next year's convention theme: Nurturing Roots, Branching Innovation: Cultivating Growth and Synthesis in Psychological Methods and Methodology.
Our vision and initiatives are responding to Alex Beaujean’s call, in last year's presidential address ("Going Back to Move Forward: A Return to Methodology"), for renewed emphasis on methodology in Division 5, APA, and psychology more generally. Alex urged us to rise above the production of research and concerns and the technical details of methods to reflect more broadly and critically on our methodological norms, that is, the assumptions, rationale, goals, evidence, limits, interrelations, and cultural-historical contexts of psychological methods. We can overcome the silos in areas of evaluation, measurement, statistics, assessment, and qualitative inquiry and among the various content areas of psychology with normative perspective--how psychological phenomena ought to be investigated.
We look forward to dialogue and collaboration among our Sections (EMS, Assessment, and SQIP), with other APA divisions, and even other disciplines. The emerging emphasis on how our knowledge ought to be acquired, based on ontological, epistemological, and axiological considerations, was featured in such August convention symposia as "The Value and Applications of Mixed Methods in Psychological Research"; "Sister Disciplines in Dialogue: The Virtues and Necessity of Interdisciplinary Exchange"; "Positivist Methods and the Decontextualization of Race: A Critical Discourse Analysis"; "Combining Focus Groups with Surveys or Interviews to Enhance Cultural Validity"; "Suppressing Subjectivity: The Costs of Semantic Drift in 'Evidence-Based Practice in Psychology'"; and "Approaching Significance: How to Navigate the Wild World of Statistics" as well as presentations by Chris Green on "The Rhetorical Force of Statistical Language in Psychology" (co-winner of Division 1's Arthur W. Staats Award Lecture for Unifying Psychology) and president Debbi Bandalos', "Culturally Responsive Testing: Perspectives from Education and Psychology."
Our division's initiatives are works in progress that welcome your input. A new Salon Series is being spearheaded by Debbi Bandalos. We are working on one Salon focusing on the use of qualitative methods by psychologists and philosophers of science to investigate the practices of natural scientists and another on methodological and social implications of indigenous psychological research in Native American communities. We hope you will suggest additional ideas and possible presenters for this year's salon series--please feel free to email us.
Our Program Co-chairs for the 2024 APA Convention in Seattle are Gabriel Velez and Joshua Langfus, who represent qualitative and quantitative methods respectively. We especially welcome submissions of the following kinds:
- Broad and critical reviews of psychological methodology as we approach the quarter century
- Cross-cutting presentations that span, compare, and integrate the full spectrum of psychological methods
- Critical studies of the values, goals, rationale, limits, and relationships (e.g., incongruities, complementarities) of existing methods
- The implications for methods of the nature and diversity of psychological subject matter
- How methods and methodology can better bridge the gulf between scientific research and practical applications of knowledge, including transformative social change.
- Psychology's relations with other (natural and social) sciences and investigative approaches in the humanities and arts
My own long-standing interest in these difficult issues goes back to my undergraduate studies of psychology, which motivated me to probe the methodological foundations of our science. I was fascinated by our history, especially the separation from philosophy of science, defined by its empirical methods parallel to if not adopted from physical sciences. I appreciated the creativity, ingenuity, and precise rationality of measurement, statistics and controlled experiment yet was also preoccupied with questions about the nature of psychological life that spans conscious, behavioral, and psycho-physiological, personal phenomena. I was struck by the criticism, debate and controversy that extended from the founding of psychology through the 20th century. My questions led me to the work of mathematician, philosopher of science, and founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl, his teacher Franz Brentano, kindred thinker Wilhelm Dilthey, and the related European movements in Gestalt, personalistic, and existential approaches that utilized qualitative methods. However, in the 1970s, the term "qualitative" had not even been coined, and little formal education and knowledge of such methods was available.
I began to clarify the methods and methodological norms of qualitative psychologists with the emerging phenomenological psychological methods to study lived experience developed by Amedeo Giorgi. I found similar methods used throughout the history of psychology in the work of such pioneers as Wundt, James, Freud, Maslow, Kohlberg, and virtually all psychologists without formal specification or explicit methodological accounts. After living through and documenting the formal emergence of qualitative methods and methodologies during the 1970s and 1980s, I am surprised by the evolving legitimation and integration of these methods that was evident in APA Division 5's welcoming inclusion of qualitative psychologists and its name change to the "Division of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods." My comparative methodological studies of qualitative methods have convinced me of fundamental commonalities in the heterogeneity of qualitative methods and their inextricable relatedness to all quantitative methods in psychology. Given innovations in all areas of psychology and growing plurality among our methods, we need a foundational, overarching understanding of the purposes, limits, and interrelations of our methods that informs us of how valid knowledge of psychological phenomena is best acquired.
Now is the time for quantitative and qualitative psychologists to come together, learn openly from and with each other. What we do often fruitfully exceeds our formal knowledge of method on the one hand and yet too often falls short of what we ought to do on the other hand. My worry is that our philosophies of psychology, without good education or careful study, have become caricatures of outdated views that divide and mislead us rather than provide a solid foundation that reflects the diverse best practices of Division 5 members and the variety of psychologists. We have the necessary expertise to engage in fresh, critical thinking in the new frontiers of 21st century psychology and are positioned to meet the challenge of forging better, increasingly integrated, and more broadly shared methodological knowledge. I hope you look forward, as I do, to learning about unknown and barely known methods from our colleagues in and beyond Division 5 in the service of larger understandings of psychological methodology.