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From theory to method
Almost 30 years ago, in the period of the so-called `crisis' in social psychology, Moscovici noted that no discipline can remain in good health if it prioritises the way in which questions are investigated over the way in which questions are asked (Moscovici, 1972). The dangers are particularly acute in the case of psychology. This is because of a paradox. On the one hand, the subject of our study is what Taylor (1985) calls a `self interpreting animal'. We do not only seek to understand ourselves but we are, at least partly, constituted by that understanding. We do not only have desires, but we have desires about what we should desire. We are not just computational mechanisms, we are beings for whom things matter. Consequently, we need not only theories but also methods which address the complexities and messiness of interpretative processes. To paraphrase Blumer's conclusion to his magnificent chapter on `the methodological position of symbolic interactionism': `respect the reflexive nature of the human subject and organize a methodological stance to reflect that respect' (cf. Blumer, 1969, p. 60).
At the same time, we also need to recognize that our knowledge of the reflexive subject will be inherently slippery as, to the extent that our models and theories gain success and come to affect the way people see themselves, they change the very thing they purport to explain. This leads to the other side of our paradox, for the consequent difficulty in producing simple laws and reliable effects places the scientific status of psychology in constant doubt and makes psychologists ever aware of being marginal scientists. Such radical doubt can lead to a tendency to over conform, to adopt the trappings of natural science as a badge of belonging. Experimentation and quantification cease to be tools that are appropriate to particular forms of enquiry and become rituals that are demanded in all enquiry. This may lose us the ability to understand our subject, but at least the disciplinary institution and its inhabitants are secure. The paradox, then, is that the very reasons which make an adequate understanding of the human subject dependent upon methodological breadth and creativity lead, in practice, to the adoption of methodological narrowness and dogmatism within the institution...