AHP - A GUIDE TO HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

HUMANISTIC RESEARCH
One of the most exciting developments of recent years is that the whole question of what is human science has been opened up and taken a stage further forward.
It had been clear for a long time - at least since the early seventies - that there was something wrong with social science. Its early promise had never been fulfilled. Psychology and sociology were labels, as it were, but the bottles had never been filled - they were still empty and sterile.
This was fairly obviously because, particularly in psychology, which had very strong aims to be accepted as scientific (and in the 80's was actually admitted to the international body representing all the sciences) there was a strong emphasis on being objective. This means treating a human being like an object, or thing. You had to work on a human being from the outside, not even allowing that anything more complicated than a computer program might be going on inside, and measure the variables - the independent variable and the dependent variable - in an accurate way. In this way explanations could be built up, and theories arrived at.
But when, after one hundred years of this, no usable or generally accepted theory ever had been arrived at, there was obviously something wrong. So much was clear. The old paradigm (pattern or style of accepted research method) was not working.
Only recently, however, has a new paradigm emerged. And it has emerged out of the humanistic approach. It turns out that the only way you can get valid and useful results out of research is by treating people like human beings, rather than as things. To say "I will only study the human mind by observing the human body" is so obviously crazy that it is almost impossible to see how it held sway for so long.
So what we do now is variously called "cooperative inquiry", "participatory research", "interpretative studies", "naturalistic inquiry" and so on. It is all new paradigm research, in its various forms. And what happens is that the outcomes of such research are directly valuable and useful to all those who took part. They feel enlivened and helped by participating in such a project, and almost always there is some social effect.
Orthodox researchers tend to ask - "But are the results generalisable?" Quite often the answer is no, but this is also true of old paradigm research itself. The typical study in old-style psychology is based on ten or twenty people, usually second-year students at a small American university. New paradigm research has been with prisoners in jail, villages in developing countries, bank employees, co-counsellors, youth camp managers and a host of other groups.
The point is that you can't have laws as in physics or chemistry - human beings are not objects and not things, they are and always have to be treated as conscious, intentional human beings. We have to talk about action rather than about behaviour.
BOOKLIST Burman E (ed)(1990) Feminists and psychological practice Sage, London. A book of readings containing papers by sixteen women. Jan Burns thinks there is a special connection between new paradigm research and feminism.
Berg D N & Smith K K (eds)(1988) The self in social inquiry Sage, London. A set of eighteen papers on research, by Alderfer, Reinharz and others; six of the authors are women. It is in four sections: issues; understanding; involvement; and methods. These between them cover hermeneutics, epistemology, feminism, anxiety, subjectivity, causality and many other problems. High standard throughout, an integrated set of references, but no index.
Hill C E (1989) Therapist techniques and client outcomes: Eight cases of brief psychotherapy Sage, London. A very thorough research study which involved clients and therapists in examining their own experiences, and made comparisons between them. Not fully humanistic, but some very interesting findings on therapist self-disclosure.
Johnson J M (1975) Doing field research The Free Press, New York. Takes us through one project in participant observation, with many acute observations and raising of important issues. Good bibliography too.
Lincoln Y S & Guba E G (1985) Naturalistic inquiry Sage, London. A very good account of the new approaches to research, with discussions of causality, generalization, values, trustworthiness and so on.
Mahrer A R (1985) Psychotherapeutic change: An alternative approach to meaning and measurement W W Norton & Company, New York. This is specifically about research into psychotherapy. Mahrer suggests that the only valid research for any uncovering therapy has to be done in the session itself. So we move from a process-outcome paradigm to an in-therapy change paradigm. This makes it possible for fine tuning of a type of therapy to take place, which existing outcome research does not permit. Should be read by all researchers into therapy or counselling.
Mitroff I I & Kilmann R H (1978) Methodological approaches to social science Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. A brilliant examination of all the possible approaches to method in the human sciences, using a Jungian diagram to integrate all the findings, making the whole thing very usable. Some good words on masculinity in science.
Reason P (ed)(1988) Human inquiry in action: Developments in new paradigm research Sage, London. Ten chapters by international researchers showing what has been happening since 1981.
Reason P & Rowan J (eds)(1981) Human inquiry: A sourcebook of new paradigm research John Wiley, Chichester. About forty authors, including HarrŽ, Mitroff, Torbert, Reinharz, Sanford, Heron, Hall and many others, contribute papers on every aspect of the new paradigm in research methods. The biggest section is on examples - papers on actual research carried out in the new way. This makes it more down to earth and more relevant than any other book in this field.
Wilber K (1983) Eye to eye: The quest for the new paradigm Anchor/Doubleday, Garden City. One of the simplest and clearest refutations of the empiricist approach to psychology is contained in chapter 2 - "The Problem of Proof" - and commented on further in chapter 6, which is an interview. The rest of the book is good too.

Previous Table of Contents Next