Probing the history of social psychology, exploring diversity and views of the social: Publication trends in the European Journal of Social Psychology from 1971 to 2016

Abstract

The European Journal of Social Psychology (EJSP), as the voice of the European Association of Social Psychology, aims to promote diversity and a distinctively ‘European’, more ‘social’, social psychology (SP). However, whether and how these objectives have been accomplished over time remains controversial. This article enters this debate, tracing the history of SP as depicted by EJSP publications, via two types of lexicometric analyses of all abstracts of the Journal (1971–2016). Themes, processes, methods, and their organisation in cycles and clusters over time, were identified and analysed. Regarding diversity, findings indicate that the publications reflect several of the new theoretical proposals that emerged over the years, but do not fully reflect the variety of perspectives and methods of the discipline. It further indicates that lately the ‘social’ is predominantly present in attention to pressing social issues, albeit the processes involved in them are mostly theorised at an individualistic level. This pattern suggests the importance of keeping open the quest for epistemological and methodological diversity, and of re‐problematising what the ‘social’ in SP means. By contributing to mapping the history of SP, offering a more comprehensive and reflexive view for it, the present analyses also help in forging a stronger discipline.

Still a matter of dialogue: A response to Potter's, Augoustinos's, and Jovchelovitch's commentaries

“…This debate over what methods should be used in social psychology research illustrates then something that we have tried to challenge in our paper – the tendency of most (DP) research to look at epistemologies and methodologies mainly as univocal and hermetic, instead of as multifaceted. Contrarily to those versions of DP only using naturalistic data, we argue that interviews and focus groups are not necessarily cognitivist as it is not data collection techniques that (can) per se ‘largely presuppose a cognitivist perspective’ (Potter, , p. 4), but instead the way they are conducted, the goals and questions behind them and the way in which the data they generate is interpreted (Rizzoli, Castro, Tuzzi, & Contarello, ; Willig, ).…”

“…The comments by Potter, Augoustinos, and Jovchelovitch both reflect and allowed us to further illustrate some recent trends. Social psychological research and social sciences’ research, in general, are more open to interdisciplinarity, methodological pluralism (Rizzoli et al ., ), rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, ) questions and approaches, and more perspectives are today engaged with issues of power and ideology. However, the concerns with epistemological clarity and solidity are also very much present.…”

Is the press presenting (neoliberal) foreign residency laws in a depoliticised way? The case of investment visas and the reconfiguring of citizenship

“…and Correio da Manhã n = 238) -our unit of analysis -which were then prepared to be submitted to the Reinert Method using the IRaMuTeQ software. The method aims at detecting word clusters (Reinert, 1986) based on the co-occurrence of similar lexical forms (words or multi-words), calculated through consecutive chi-square tests, using a hierarchical descending classification (Rizzoli et al, 2019). The word clusters are then computer-generated on the basis of similar lexical contents.…”

Prologue: History, Themes, Analysis, and Rationale

“…In similar contexts to this one, Rooney et al (2011) used Leximancer to track changes in the content of abstracts over time in the journal Management Communication Quarterly , Cretchley et al (2010) conducted a similar analysis of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology , and Rizzoli et al (2019) analyzed the abstracts of the European Journal of Social Psychology . As earlier studies have done, we used the Leximancer function of including decade of publication in the map.…”