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Qualitative research in psychology

• Parker, Ian
• Burman, Erica

Psychologists tell us that they are bit by bit discovering more and more abouthuman behaviour and the mind. The problem is that as quickly as we find out things abouthuman beings, those things seem to vanish before our eyes. We find that people in one oranother group or culture do not behave or think as the psychological model would predict,and, more importantly, we find that our awareness, our reflection upon a process asdescribed by a psychologist, changes that process. It is in the nature of human nature tochange, to change as different linguistic resources, social practices, and representations ofthe self become available, and for human nature to change itself as people reflect on whothey are and who they may become. This means that any attempt to fix us in place must fail.But it will only fail in such a way that something productive emerges from it if we do somethingdifferent, and one place to do something different is in psychology instead. We needto step back and look at the images of the self, mind and behaviour that psychologists haveproduced, the types of practices they engage in, and the power those practices, those 'technologiesof the self, have to set limits on change. We can then look at what psychologistsmight do instead.

• Psychology

• Feminist psychology

critical psychology, cyberpsychology, feminist psychology, queer psychology

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