Main Divisions Between Mainstream and Critical Social Psychology

One of the main divisions between mainstream and critical neighborly mental science is that of the methods adopted. Discuss with reference to the cognitive affectionate and at to the lowest degree one other companionable psychological perspective. Social psychological science has existed for about 100 years, before which psychology was a branch of philosophy. Social psychology studies single(a)s in their loving contexts. It is a diverse discipline do up of many theoretical perspectives and variety of dissimilar methods ar used in well-disposed psychological research. This assignment explores the main principles of different methods in social psychology.It will look at the underlying theories or perspectives that organise contemporary social and discursive psychological research and knowledge and critic exclusivelyy evaluate different theoretical perspectives and methods. Cognitive social psychology studies the information processing individual in a social context to ana lyse individual cognitions in controlled social conditions. It is a quantative cash advance. It dominates psychological social psychology and emerged from the brushup of behaviourism in the mid twentieth century.Researchers use an data-based approach involving controlled experimental conditions to produce numeric data that ignore be measured and analysed to produce statistically valid conclusions. Discursive psychology focuses on the external world of chat, its meaning and effects and studies the socially constructed, fixed and contingent identity. It is a soft approach. It emerged in the 1970s with the linguistic turn, and was influenced by sociological social psychology. Researchers use discourse analysis to produce soft data by conversational and textual analysis.Phenomenological psychology focuses on the detailed description of social hold up derived through the senses. It is a qualitative approach using the rich description of experience. It studies the internal world o f the fountainhead in relational settings and its effect on action using first-person written account of experience, inter scenery and literary text. It originated in the philosophy of Husserl in the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century. Social psychoanalyticalal psychology or psychosocial studies the internal world of the psyche in relational settings and its effects on actions.It is a qualitative approach. It looks at the conflicted psyche in dynamic relation with the external world. Using case study and unleash association narrative, interviews and observation qualitative data is evaluated through interpretation of what is unsaid as well as said. Its original development was in the clinic and it became an ara of academic study in the late twentieth century. in that respect are foursome overarching themes that sack be used to interrogate a set of value issues that screen social psychology.These are known as head themes and they are outlined below. powerfulness dealin gs are central to the way that all knowledge is produced and interpreted. Power permeates everything we do and all our relationships . Power is neither neat nor bad but it is what is done with it that determines this. Power is relational and the balance changes in different contexts. It is contextual and find out rather than absolute. Questions of power were first raised in relation to the deception of participants in the name of science.For spokesperson in Stanley Milgrams (1965) experiment where participants were required to give increasing levels of electric shock to Milgrams colleagues who constitute as recipients of the electric shocks. The focus was on power relations between the scientist and participants, many of whom performed, as they believed, unhealthful and sadistic acts on the instructions of the scientist. Ethical guidelines in social psychology live with been hugely influenced by this. The question of who has the power to interpret peoples experiences applies to all social psychological research.We need to be careful how we base interpretations on evidence, and we must interrogate how that evidence and those meanings came to be produced within what assumptions and power relations. Power relations raise the issue of the relationship between the researcher and the participants. Another interrogative theme is situated knowledges. Knowledge always comes from a belief or view point Knowledge is always situated somewhere and sometime it changes with time and is situated in terms of values, cultures, belief systems and history. It changes with social change.Knowledge achievement needs to be situated at the level of every piece of research. Methods are highly prestigious in the knowledges that are produced. Another interrogative theme is individual-society dualism. The most enduring theme in social psychology is whether individual or society is privileged in the exposition of social psychological phenomena and derives from the wider dualism of explanations that have characterised western thought since the Enlightenment. Individual-society dualism very much manifested in a reduction of explanation to either biological (often genetic) or social causes.Sometimes both/and explanations also suffer form this dualism because they behave as if there is no other level of explanation, only an interaction between biological and social factors. Genuinely social psychological explanations get squeezed out. Agency-structure dualism is the twin problem of individual-social dualism. The binary terms agency and structure mirror the terms individual and society in the following way if individuals are seen as relatively independent of social influence, they can be theorised as agents of their own destinies.On the other hand, if social structures are overwhelmingly influential in individual action, peoples choices and desires would be irrelevant. Traditional social theory placed such idiom on the power of social structures in governing peoples actions that this led to self determinism. A challenge for social psychology is to be able to understand the dynamic tension between desires and actions that are relatively indigent and ones that are heavily constrained by circumstances, rather than fall into assumptions on either side of the agency-structure binary.This interrogative theme will help us remain aware of dangers which, like individual-society dualism, have strong political and ethical implications. All of these interrogative themes are expedient in evaluating social psychological research and theories. in that respect are differences and similarities between the four perspectives on social psychology that have been defined in this essay. They all have reflexivity because the researchers are prepared to put themselves in the picture of knowledge production. They are all explicit about the way their approach is appropriate to the object of analysis.A difference between the qualitative and quantitative approac h is whether the object of analysis is hidden from view. This is highlighted as an advantage of the cognitive social psychology experimental method and is also central to the free association narrative interview method which draws from the psychoanalytic concept of unconscious dynamics. Phenomenological psychology, whose object of analysis is conscious experience, aims to elaborate qualities previously hidden form view through rich description. In contrast, discourse analysis is not interested in underlying moment but in words.Whereas discourse analysis is interested in emotion terms, social psychoanalysis looks for emotions themselves , maculation the object of phenomenological analysis is the emotions that people are aware of and can therefore describe. Social psychoanalysis and the experimental method look for causes of actions, but discourse analysis rejects this, and phenomenology focuses on experience rather than its causes or motives. manoeuver of the research setting is t he issue that most clearly differentiates quantitative and qualitative approaches. Experimental psychology models social processes in order to control them.The other three approaches seek ecological validity by researching in social settings. Within the qualitative approaches there are differences in emphasis. Discourse analysts prefer to collect discourse as it can be found, although they also conduct interviews. The social psychoanalytical and phenomenological approaches rely in eliciting experience, often grounded in a narrative of actual events. Narrative is becoming an overarching theme in qualitative social psychology, partly because of the critique of unstructured interview techniques on the grounds that they dictate the terms in which participants can give their accounts.When interviews are relatively unstructured, participants have a tendency to give accounts in narrative form. It is useful to compare the different methodological approaches in relation to their analysis of The Guardians story print on 24 May 2004 about an Iraqi family, a mother an her children. The womans married man ( the childrens father) had died in detention during the American/British invasion and the newspaper quoted the womans result I will always abhor you people.The Cognitive Social Psychology Experimental approach outlined by Russell Spears states that experimental evidence is the lifeblood of psychology and experiments provide the control to assess causal relations and patterns among variables that may not be apparent to the naked eye. Whist acknowledging that we cannot reproduce in the lab the conditions that cling to this kind of hatred, we can model some of the proposed processes and test implications of theories. The psychoanalytical perspective referred to by Wendy Hollway is a clinical rather than a research method.Free association interviewing is used to reach beyond the structured interviewing that dominates qualitative research and risks constraining intervie wees with assumptions provided by questions. Derek Edwards discussion of discursive social psychology proposes looking at the cover up and how the words and, descriptions and accounts are assembled and put to work. He focuses on the reports themselves , how they provide for causal explanations, invoke psychological states and pee implications for politics and policy. This approach examines how people deploy commonsense psychological ideas.Darren Langridge explores phenomenological social psychology as a descriptive enterprise. Data is collected though first person written accounts or interviews. The rush towards explanation is avoided. The aim is to identify structural qualities that are invariant across the experience, as well as those that are more idiosyncratic, focusing on the reasons but not the causes behind the phenomena in the hope of providing new insights that may enable us to effect change. In conclusion, there are similarities and differences between the methodologies used to explore the four perspectives in social psychology that have been discussed.Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and all can contribute to the keep development of theories and approaches within social psychology. References Milgram, S ( 1974) Obedience to Authority An Experimental View, London, Tavistock. Spears , R. , Hollway, W. and Edwards, D. (2005) Three views on hate, The Psychologist, vol 18, no 9, September, pp. 844-7. Social Psychology Matters Book 1, Chapter 2 by Wendy Hollway, Book 2, Chapter 1 (Introductions) Open University Press. videodisk 1 Social Psychology Critical Perspectives on Self and Others.