Epilogue: Different Perspectives on Individual-Based Generalizations in Psychology

Abstract

The role of the individual subject in scientific psychology has always been a controversial issue in psychology. Throughout the aim of the present volume was to analyze some of the theoretical and methodological sides of that issue, and to bring together psychologists from different fields who have attempted to work out research techniques that are based on individual subjects. The contributors to this book emphasized different aspects of the role of the individual subject, and suggested various ways of constructing basic knowledge in our discipline on the basis of individual subjects’ data. These ways ranged from an emphasis on the integration of idiographic and nomothetic research approaches (Walsch-burger, Grossmann) to the separation of the two approaches, depending on whether the given field is aimed at explanation of the generalized (individual) system, or a population of such systems (chapters by Cairns, Valsiner, Thorngate). Furthermore, the contributors expressed widely different opinions on the role of statistical methodologies in the study of individual subjects—ranging from the innovative use of traditional methods (Walschburger, Thoman, and Rogoff & Gauvain) to the need for devising novel methodology (Dywan & Segalowitz and Mace & Kratochwill), and further to the need for preserving the integrity of the psychological phenomena, whatever methods are being used (Cairns, Ginsburg, Valsiner). Going beyond ordinary single-case statistical methodology, Thorn-gate and Carroll outlined a strategy for comparison of hypotheses that can be applied to individual subjects. Grossmann and Franck outlined the historical side of the issue of inference from individual subjects. The issue that is of concern to the contributors to the present volume has been in the center of attention of psychologists and philosophers in the past. It has been discussed; psychologists have fought over it to prove their claim for the scientific nature of their points of view (e.g., Allport, 1940, 1946; Holt, 1962; Skaggs, 1945, and others, discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 in this volume)—and after a while the whole issue was abandoned as a topic, until another generation of psychologists picked it up again. Such episodic interest in the role of the individual subject in psychology illustrates how psychologists’ social environment guides scientists in their efforts to explain psychological phenomena (Buss, 1978; Flanagan, 1981; Gergen, 1973, 1982). Unfortunately, the issue itself has remained unsolved, and much dispute around it has facilitated selective forgetting of what had been actually said by our predecessors (see Grossmann’s chapter for details).