Making Sense of the Attraction of Psychology: On the Strengths and Weaknesses for Education and Educational Research

Abstract

Psychology studies a great variety of processes (e.g. conflict, aggression, frustration, memory, learning) and is used in different fields or areas (e.g. labour relations, mental health, advertising, human resources management, the courts, people’s private life). Among these, one also finds education and child-rearing. Psychology not only carries with it the promise that it will deliver insights into human behaviour, it is also believed that it can help to address the problems human beings are confronted with in the situations they find themselves in. The number of psychology researchers is growing and so is the number of job opportunities requiring this type of qualification or areas in which those who studied psychology are employed. It is an understatement to claim that psychology nowadays favours a particular methodology and the use of certain methods. Though it loves to refer to itself as embracing ‘post-positivism’, it can be asked whether it really has parted from logical empiricism characterized by the invariance of perception, meaning and methodology. Randomized field trials and (quasi-)experiments are paradigmatically recognized as the preferred way to proceed. It is true that parts of the discipline are no longer wary of the use of qualitative methods and are sometimes even interested in ‘the particular’, but it can be questioned whether this is more than the use of qualitative data within a design that is foremost aimed at explanation (whether causal, quasi-causal or probabilistic) and which is looking for the general, i.e. to be able to generalize insights. The discipline thrives in the present climate of research output that almost exclusively values publications in ‘Web of Knowledge’ journals. It has penetrated many domains of society, and its vocabulary and discourse have become part of our everyday conversations. Such a success story is likely to attract researchers working in other areas who gladly take the lead from those who work in a booming field. Educational researchers are no exception to this, but in their case, more needs to be said.