Introduction
When psychologists conduct research with humans, a professional relationship exists between two parties – psychological investigators and participants – who share a common humanity. Such relationships have a history of diverse social arrangements that evoke different epistemological and ethical, perhaps political meanings. For most of the discipline’s history mainstream psychologists have organized researcher-participant relationships hierarchically in pursuit of methodological objectivity when conducting research. Yet, from a critical perspective, beyond their relatively objective aspects, researcher-participant relationships in psychology are saturated with intersubjective influence and can be reconstructed along participatory lines.
Definition
The term, researcher-participant relationships, refers to the relationship between psychological investigators, on the one hand, and the individuals who provide data, on the other hand. This relationship specifies functions and...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Baumrind, D. (1964). Some thoughts on ethics of research: After reading Milgram’s “behavioral study of obedience. American Psychologist, 19, 421–423.
Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Kelman, H. C. (1972). The rights of the subject in social research: An analysis in terms of relative power and legitimacy. American Psychologist, 27, 989–1016.
Koch, S., & Leary, D. E. (Eds.). (1985). A century of psychology as science. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kusch, M. (1995). Recluse, interlocutor, interrogator: Natural and social order in turn-of-the-century psychological research schools. ISIS, 86, 419–433.
Morawski, J. (2007). Scientific selves: Discerning the subject and the experimenter in experimental psychology in the United States, 1900–1935. In M. G. Ash & T. Sturm (Eds.), Psychology’s territories: Historical and contemporary perspectives from different disciplines (pp. 129–148). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Rosenzweig, S. (1933). The experimental situation as a psychological problem. Psychological Review, 40, 337–354.
Walsh-Bowers, R. (1995). The reporting and ethics of the research relationship in areas of interpersonal psychology, 1939–89. Theory & Psychology, 5, 233–250.
Online Resource
Kurt Danziger. www.kurtdanziger.com
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this entry
Cite this entry
Walsh, R.T.G. (2014). Researcher-Participant Relationship. In: Teo, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_267
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_267
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-5582-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-5583-7
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Sciences