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THE articles by Chris Stevenson and Neil Cooper, and by Carol Sherrard responded helpfully and accurately to the issues I tried to raise. This open discussion of an issue of basic importance to the future direction of psychology is to be welcomed.
Chris Stevenson and Neil Cooper were quite right to point out that qualitative psychology is a political issue. As they said, academic psychologists, at least in the United Kingdom, have traditionally taken great pains to have their discipline regarded as a normal science. 'Psychology as a discipline and profession therefore has a vested interest in maintaining the dominance of objectivity in relation to the production of psychological knowledge.' (p.159.)
The success of previous generations of psychologists in persuading their scientific colleagues that psychology is at least an embryonic science is reflected in the level of support given to psychology departments for carrying out research and teaching students.
From time to time, heads of departments of psychology have to beat off determined challenges to the status of psychology as a laboratory-based subject. All this will be at risk if psychology goes down the road which qualitative researchers would like to follow. Psychology would become, as it is in some parts of Europe, an arts-based discipline; its funding would decline; and scientific psychologists would leave to take up appointments in departments of cognitive science or neuroscience.
There is another political matter, which is tricky to express without giving offence. Several commentators in The Psychologist over the last few years have been worrying that psychology at university level is becoming an overwhelmingly 'female' subject. How, it is asked, can the subject make itself more attractive to 'boys'? I put the gender terms in scare-quotes here because the issue obviously has nothing to do with biological sex. Many of the best experimental scientists in psychology are women.
But it is apparently a fact that the subject is failing to attract 'boys' in the same way that physics and engineering fail to attract 'girls'. And this trend will continue, I suggest, if the subject contrives to turn its back even further on the technical disciplines of science, and stresses instead the kind of issues that are concerned with the more emotional business of forming social relationships, and analysing...