This article addresses the need for an inclusive methodology in psychology. What exactly is 'methodology,' and how does it relate to our multitude of methods for knowledge acquisition? If methodology is the study of methods employed by psychologists, what methods are used to acquire methodological knowledge? A few recent works on these issues by leaders of APA's Division of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods (5) are reviewed. An expanded, multifaceted conceptualization of methodology is proposed, and the methods necessary for methodological research are outlined. Recent challenges to psychological research, including crises of replication, measurement, generalization and the relationship between science and practice are delineated, and the central problem of scientifically studying consciousness (broadly conceived, including behavior) is highlighted. Edmund Husserl's rigorously scientific philosophy, little known among psychologists, is suggested to extend science to consciousness, and the phenomenological method he elaborated is suggested as fundamental for uniquely psychological research on lived experience. Finally, APA Division 5's recent publishing initiative to move toward an inclusive methodological normativity for psychology is presented.
In his presidential address to Division 5, entitled "Going Back to Move Forward: A Return to Methodology," Alex Beaujean (2022) insisted on the importance of methodology, which he contrasted to methods—the ordered set of practices used to acquire knowledge. Adding “logos” to “method,” methodology offers knowledge of methods, including critical justification of the ways we pursue data and arrive at knowledge claims. Methodology is not a toolbox of practices but theory—the philosophical understanding of methods as ways of thinking that include norms—how psychological knowledge ought to be pursued. According to Beaujean, psychology's central problem across its panoply of methods is that of how the “psyche” (again, broadly conceived including “consciousness,” “lived experience,” and “behavior”—the non-physical aspects of personal existence) can be investigated scientifically.
Jolynn Pek, President-elect of APA Division 5, recently highlighted the importance of quantitative methodology with co-author Daniel Bauer (Pek & Bauer, 2023). They empirically documented problems in statistical mediation, construct validity, and power analysis that have not followed from methodological directives. They argued that extant meta-scientific (methodological and theoretical) articles have not had sufficient impact on practice, despite their high citation rate, because methodology is less valued than method (tool) development; lacks incentives for dissemination and pedagogy; is an expertise of few quantitative psychologists, and is learned without carefully developed, formal training. They recommended that psychology's funding agencies, professional societies, and research institutions enhance the incentives for quantitative methodological works and promote more synergistic relations between methodologists and empirical researchers.
Osbeck (2005) suggested that our methodology has overemphasized following explicit rules in research practice and provided examples of theoretical advances in natural science (e.g., Galileo) that broke from rigid, binding procedures. She argued that understanding multiple methods—each with its own units of analysis, subject matter, and goals—requires an expanded view of scientific rationality, including the epistemological, ontological, and ethical dimensions of method apart from their technical procedures. Beyond hypothesis testing, one-size-fits-all conceptions of method, and the technical rules commonly found in our curriculum, psychological scientific methods require sociocultural understanding and include observation, imagination, values and aesthetics, morality, intuitive capacities and practices, and critical historical analysis. Among the lessons of philosophers Descartes and Vico are normative principles such as clarity and distinctness of ideation, movement from the simple to the complex, comprehensive reasoning that incorporates all relevance, rhetoric—the art of eloquent expression, passion and fantasy, metaphoric and other inventive arrangements of thought, implicit practices irreducible to prior accounts of method, researchers' reflections on implicit ways of knowing, and an inclusion of diverse exemplars of good practice in achieving psychological knowledge. Osbeck's analysis compellingly suggests all these processes are crucial in psychological methods and therefore ought to be highlighted in our methodology.
Methodology not only describes methods but problematizes and critically analyzes the ways subject matters are known. It informs us not only of their subtle inner reasoning but of their history, assumptions, purposes, applications, problems, goals, potentials, limits, and relations with other methods and society. By no means value-free, methodology is normative in that it addresses how the subject matter ought to be known and how methods ought to be interrelated. The employment of methods without methodology is methodolatry—naive and unaccountable practice, even when it is carried out perfectly by the book. Methodology has its own methods (approaches to methodological knowledge), but the question of what methods are required to conduct methodological inquiry is rarely posed and explicitly answered.
The work of Beaujean, Pek and Bauer, and Osbeck suggest surprisingly diverse and demanding methods for the metascience of methodology. These include researchers' reflections on and accounts of their own practices and performances (beyond standardized descriptions of methods), detailed exploration of others' best practices in history and contemporary research, empirical investigations of research practices, and multidisciplinary inquiries into methods that utilize philosophy (ontology, axiology, and epistemology), history, sociology, psychology, mathematics, and linguistics. We psychologists have resources for methodological research, including critical, mathematical expertise and our rich literature on measurement and quantitative analysis. Qualitative psychological methods for investigating science and psychology include phenomenology, grounded theory, narrative and discursive methods. Our own literature includes social and historical critique of contemporary methods and a small but important psychology of science and psychology of psychology. However, the siloed development and organization of psychological methods as well as the difficulty mastering multiple methods limits comparative methodology and an inclusive, integrative normativity. Methodology that features the disciplines mentioned above is largely absent from our education and training.
The lack of a well-developed, inclusive, and rigorous methodology has significant consequences. Devine (2020) claimed that psychology is a discipline in crisis and identified the "four horsemen" of this crisis in the problems of replication, measurement, generalizability, and practicality. He argued that the replication crisis is an outcome of the other three—a consequence of our lacking methods that provide knowledge of what we are measuring, that generalize beyond research to real-life situations, and that effectively address society's most troubling problems. The essentially methodological resolution of psychology's crisis suggested by Devine is that we reconceptualize psychology's place among the sciences and in society; address the issue of values, which requires philosophical reflection; converse with thinkers in other fields to reunite psychology and the humanities; and finally transcend the limits of psychology in a collective search for truth in science.
I have found most helpful the work of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century and a methodologist par excellence. One of his central problems was epistemological, that of how conscious persons achieve knowledge that is objectively true. A student of astronomy, physics, and mathematics, Husserl greatly admired the achievements of quantitative reasoning in natural science and technology. He accepted the commitment of his mentor, Franz Brentano (1838-1917), to practicing philosophy as a rigorous science that could be extended universally to investigate consciousness in addition to and in relation to physical nature. 'Universal' science requires understanding the distinctive features of consciousness using methods that achieve true theoretical and empirical knowledge of lived experience. Husserl (with Brentano) understood that consciousness is not an object, let alone a physical one, for it transcends itself in its intentional relations with objects, situations, the world. Dilthey (1833-1911), like Brentano, understood that psychological and physical realities differ essentially and that psychology requires distinctive methods to access and provide valid knowledge of subjective meaning, which is the fundamental property of psychological phenomena. From studying Dilthey, Husserl realized that his philosophical studies of consciousness could provide methodological and theoretical foundations for psychology and the other empirical sciences of mental life such as anthropology, sociology, history, and political science (Sakakibara, 2021).
I believe that Husserl's study of the essence of science and its history can help psychology achieve a more inclusive methodological self-understanding. Husserl (1989) viewed science, modeled on mathematics, as a cultural ethos rather than any fixed set(s) of methods or rules for knowing. Particular methods of science have changed dramatically over history in its adaptation to new subject matter, societal problems and insights into its phenomena. In 1923-1924, Husserl published several articles on renewal in the Japanese journal, Kaizo, that traced the ethos of universal science as it evolved from ancient Greece to recent times. Science prioritizes free, critical thinking; communal dialogue and debate among equals; the provision of evidence for knowledge and truth claims; and ethical responsibility for humanity's shaping of the world. Science is the antithesis of dogma, authoritarianism, prejudices of all kinds, groundless beliefs, naive conformity, and skeptical relativism. An aspirational ideal, the ethos of science has been lost in some periods of history and cultural contexts, such as the Dark Ages. This ideal has remained a latent possibility and was renewed in modernity by the natural sciences. Ironically, the historical successes of the physical sciences led to their methods being taken as an exclusive model for science, limiting its free, critical, evidence-based extension to mental life, to the most pressing problems of humanity. Science is not restricted to or to be identified exclusively with the methods of physical science, such as hypothesis testing or the mathematization of nature, even as successful and valuable as those practices have been. Husserl viewed twentieth century science as in crisis and in need of renewal if it is to deeply and truly address the issues of war, oppression, poverty, suffering, injustice, and phenomena that require a scientific knowledge of consciousness, personal life activities, and social institutions in addition to material nature. Husserl sought to renew science by explicating and instituting methods for achieving knowledge of humanity, including knowledge of science itself as a responsible, personal-cultural institution.
Husserl developed and employed a method capable of rigorously investigating mental life in an unprejudiced, evidence-based way (Sakakibara, 2021). He did not uniquely invent this method but conceptually clarified it from his own and others' practices. Husserl called this method "phenomenology" and employed it in investigations of perception, imagination, time-consciousness, empathy and intersubjectivity, the formation and development of the ego/person, logic, mathematics, and the natural and human sciences. In the 20th century, phenomenology was deliberately practiced in over 50 countries and more than 40 disciplines including psychology (Embree, 2010). This procedurally flexible method has been employed in many different ways—modified for various subject matters, disciplinary problems and goals, and diverse investigators' talents and ingenuity. At its core, this method has four interrelated constituents (Husserl, 1962, 1970). Most fundamentally, the method requires an attitude that focuses exclusively on concrete lived experiences. One puts aside theoretical and social prejudices, especially the construal of mental life as an object such as we find in material reality, and instead the investigator focuses exclusively on temporally flowing experiences of the world's meanings, values, and purposes. Second, this method gathers concrete examples of lived experience, necessarily through the only two ways they are accessible: reflection (recollections of one's own mental life) and empathy (understanding the expressions of others' mental lives). Third, examples are analytically clarified by means of emergent ideation at varying levels of generality, ranging from the factual characteristics of individual experiences to the essential constituents and structures found across empirical and imaginatively varied examples of subjective life. Forth and finally, the method entails rich, detailed, high-fidelity description of the conceptual findings with illustrative evidence in concrete examples of lived experience. Like all scientific methods, this one is iterative and corrigible. It can be carried out rigorously or carelessly, formally or informally, and with or without methodological self-consciousness. Its performances are always open to critique, modification, alternative procedures, and improvements. Methodological understanding and clear norms help establish and maintain the best scientific practice of phenomenological method.
My own methodological research has suggested that the so called 'phenomenological' method has been implicitly operative throughout the history of psychology, especially in the work of our most forward-moving and impactful investigators (Wertz, 2018, 2023, 2024; Wertz et al., 2011). However, this method has often not been reflectively practiced or methodologically acknowledged, let alone explicitly featured in the curriculum or institutionalized norms. Notably James (2008), in his classic investigation of religious experience, explicitly detailed and elaborated all four constituent practices of this method without any knowledge of European phenomenology. The first qualitative method published in a peer reviewed psychology journal, the Critical Incident Technique, was published by John Flanagan (1954), a psychometrician and former president of APA Division 5. The method requires putting aside theories, expert opinions and hypotheses and instead collecting concrete incidents of effective and ineffective human performances that provide a basis for original analysis and general knowledge. Other seminal psychologists as diverse as Darwin, Freud, Skinner, Kohlberg, Maslow, Bandura, and Kahneman and Tversky have practiced proto-phenomenological method without explicit acknowledgement of its scientific status. Feest (2019) documented this method in early twentieth century research in Germany by Gestalt and in the US by structuralist researchers. It is striking that the standard curriculum for research methods in psychology makes no mention whatsoever of reflection or empathy, the collection of singular examples of lived experience, or emergent analytic ideation, which are necessary for rigorously accessing and knowing psychological life. Only in the late twentieth century were these qualitative analytical practices rigorously specified (e.g., by Giorgi, 1985) and consequently accepted as scientific. Likely having adopted Newtonian physics as a model, our curriculum still fails to articulate methods specific for the investigation of psychological subject matter and to integrally relate them to more general quantitative methods.
In the late 20th century, psychology's methods became dramatically pluralistic, and the value of both qualitative and quantitative has been broadly accepted in the new century. Diverse methods have been developed but employed largely in silos. Few psychologists have an inclusive methodological grasp of the current pluralism of methods despite a growing emphasis on the value of "mixed methods." APA Division 5 includes expertise and engagement in a broad range of methods, not only basic qualitative and quantitative methods but those employed in professional practices such as assessment and evaluation, which feature the integration of multiple methods. In the past year, leaders in Division 5 have undertaken an initiative to publish a volume on methodology that includes the wide range of methods in the division's sections—qualitative, statistical, measurement, assessment, and evaluation. This volume, tentatively entitled Handbook of Methodology for Psychology in the 21st Century: Progress, Critique and Future, aims to provide an unprecedented inclusiveness and emphasis on cross-cutting issues that will facilitate a comparison, over-arching understanding, and integration of previously disparate methods. These cross-cutting issues include, for instance, the relations of qualitative and quantitative methods, construct validity, causal inference, generalization, evidence, person/culture-centered science, diversity-equity-inclusion, and the relationship between psychological knowledge and real world impactful practice. Several publishers competed strongly for the volume, which will be published by Guilford, and the royalties will be assigned to Division 5 for use in furthering psychological methodology.
The Division 5 book initiative, spearheaded by seven current and former division presidents and four leading methodologists, embodies the ethos of science articulated by Husserl. The collaborators are a community engaging in free and critical thinking, open dialogue and debate, evidence-based reasoning, and social responsibility. Collaborators (alphabetically) include Deborah Bandalos, Alexander Beaujean, Rachel Fouladi, Kurt Geisinger, Lisa Harlow, Rodney Hopson, Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead, Lisa Osbeck, Jolynn Pek, Frederick Wertz, and Cynthia Winston Proctor. This collaboration has been extraordinary in the openness, mutual respect, willingness to learn from and with each other, and creative consensus-building among participants who represent all kinds of diversity. Chapter topics were identified as representative of the multiple methods that are contributing to progress in psychology in the first quarter of the new century, ranging from psychobiography to psychometric network modeling, cross-cultural measurement, artificial intelligence, indigenous and liberation psychology, and mixed methods. Chapter authors were selected for their methodological expertise and were encouraged to enlist co-authors with diverse points of view, ethnicities, nationalities, ages, and areas of psychology. The initiative aims to offer psychologists an overarching, critical methodological understanding of the broad spectrum of methods currently contributing to psychological knowledge in the science and profession of psychology. This collaboration seeks to guide the development of a broader and more integrative methods curriculum for the education of future generations of psychologists. The volume editors, encouraged and supported by Guilford, hope this volume initiates series of publications that will contribute to an inclusive methodological normativity for psychology.