Reflexivity and the psychologist

Morawski, Jill G.

doi:10.1177/0952695105058472

Cited by 81 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…In the spirit of engendering such 'reflexivity' (e.g., Morawski, 1994Morawski, , 2006, we conclude by agreeing with Latour (1990) that our own empiricism relies more on the observation of human-made inscriptions and less on the literal act of looking at nature than this empiricist article has hitherto suggested. We never observed a 'graph schema' directly, but we spent quite some time puzzling over participants' graphs, and still longer looking at the graphs of our results that emerged from SPSS and our own hand-drawn sketches.…”

Section: Graph Order and Social Constructionismsupporting

confidence: 55%

Graphing the order of the sexes: Constructing, recalling, interpreting, and putting the self in gender difference graphs.

Hegarty¹,

Lemieux²,

McQueen³

2010

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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Published as Hegarty, P., Lemieux, A., & McQueen, G. (2010). Graphing the order of the sexes: Constructing, recalling, interpreting, and putting the self in gender difference graphs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98,[375][376][377][378][379][380][381][382][383][384][385][386][387][388][389][390][391]. AbstractGraphs seem to connote facts more than words or tables do. Consequently, they seem unlikely places to spot implicit sexism at work. Yet, in 6 studies (N _ 741), women and men constructed (Study 1) and recalled (Study 2) gender difference graphs with men's data first, and graphed powerful groups (Study 3) and individuals (Study 4) ahead of weaker ones. Participants who interpreted graph order as evidence of author "bias" inferred that the author graphed his or her own gender group first (Study 5). Women's, but not men's, preferences to graph men first were mitigated when participants graphed a difference between themselves and an opposite-sex friend prior to graphing gender differences (Study 6). Graph production and comprehension are affected by beliefs and suppositions about the groups represented in graphs to a greater degree than cognitive models of graph comprehension or realist models of scientific thinking have yet acknowledged.

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Section: Graph Order and Social Constructionismsupporting

confidence: 55%

Graphing the order of the sexes: Constructing, recalling, interpreting, and putting the self in gender difference graphs.

Hegarty¹,

Lemieux²,

McQueen³

2010

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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“…At the heart of this project is a particular form of reflexivity (Morawski, 2005): a thoroughgoing exploration of the epistemological slipperiness endemic to psychology between knower and known, observation and intervention, measurement and improvement. While many STS scholars contend that these dynamics govern all science, because psychology deals with self-aware beings capable of generating meaning about their condition, it furnishes unique material for investigating 'the full circuit of the historical kinetics linking theory, culture, and consciousness' (Morawski, 2001).…”

Section: Rethinking Reflexivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Subject matter: Human behavior, psychological expertise, and therapeutic lives

Pettit

2014

Soc Stud Sci

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Pettit 147 communication (Gitlin, 1978). On this basis, critical psychologist-historians select their favored disorder or construct, offer a largely intellectual history of it, and then assert that everyday experience has been psychologized. Such an approach speaks more to scientists' visions and pretensions than to the social life of psychological facts (O'Connor and Joffe, 2013). Moreover, this approach bolsters and inflates, rather than critically scrutinizes, the scientist's authority. We need greater specificity about psychology's impact, better evidence of the circuits between expert description and self-understanding, and appreciation of the complicated lives of scientific methods and theories.The books under review explore entanglements of psychology, sex, childhood, and development, and in so doing offer rich resources for rethinking much of the received wisdom about the public understanding of psychology, the authority of its experts, and the process of subjectification. The sex/gender distinction has long been recognized as a crucial site of traffic between nature and culture, one weighty with politics and consequences. These dynamics are amplified around children and development, where behavioral sciences and social policy meet, and each tries to anticipate and realize a better future (Adams et al., 2009). As the books here illustrate, psychology does not seek simply to craft accurate depictions of human behavior, but rather to sustain therapeutic regimes directed at intervention and improvement. In other words, the books foreground those sites where psychology's ambitions to 'make up people' (Hacking, 2002) become most explicit.At first glance, Peter Hegarty's (2013) book seems like a narrow micro-study. After all, it focuses on a brief dispute between two scientists. In 1948, Lewis Terman wrote a scathing and detailed critique of the methodology and findings of Alfred Kinsey's fielddefining survey of American sexual behavior. However, the book is less a history of these figures than it is a series of essays that draw freely from social theory, cognitive science, and archival research to explore the co-production of sexuality and intelligence as two of the most salient categories of human difference. Hegarty complicates received wisdom that sees Kinsey as the liberator of American sexual attitudes and Terman as the eugenicist intelligence tester. At the same time, Hegarty destabilizes longstanding assumptions within the field of sexology where the scientist's heterosexuality is often equated with greater impartiality and objectivity. He shows that both men were deeply invested in their subjects' sexual proclivities and cognitive abilities, and he uses their dispute to open a broad history of sexuality that examines the link between masturbation and precociousness, the historical stability of patterns of sexual behavior, sex as a predictor of class, and the role of religion in repressing sexual urges. At the heart of the book is the figure of the queer genius. Unsurprisingly, Michel Foucault's theoriz...

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“…A nice example here is described by Merrifield (1993). Residents from Yellow Creek, Kentucky, who were concerned about the health effects of toxins that had entered the water supply, formed an action group that enlisted the support of researchers from Vanderbilt University in order to develop a survey.…”

Section: How To Accommodate Participant Subjectivity Within Psychologmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subjectivity in psychological science: From problem to prospect.

Gough¹,

Madill²

2012

Psychological Methods

130

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The problem of subjectivity within psychological research has long been recognized. The practices of scientific psychology, however, continue to assume that objectivity is desirable, even if not completely possible, and that subjectivity is a source of bias that must be minimized or eliminated. Such a dispassionate stance has offered and continues to offer a range of benefits, not least a tight focus on participants' relevant responses. Nonetheless, in this article, we question the wisdom of always or automatically working to minimize participant and researcher subjectivity, and we invite psychological researchers to consider the benefits of a more, what we term, reflexive scientific attitude. We turn in particular to recent theoretical and methodological innovations within qualitative research in order to help us progress toward a more reflexive psychological science where subjectivity is re-viewed as a resource that can be tapped in order to contextualize and enrich the psychological research process and its products.

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Reflexivity and the psychologist

Cited by 81 publications

References 64 publications

Graphing the order of the sexes: Constructing, recalling, interpreting, and putting the self in gender difference graphs.

Graphing the order of the sexes: Constructing, recalling, interpreting, and putting the self in gender difference graphs.

Subject matter: Human behavior, psychological expertise, and therapeutic lives

Subjectivity in psychological science: From problem to prospect.

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