Tectonic Change: The Qualitative Paradigm in Psychology

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Abstract

Qualitative methods are presented as a candidate for a new paradigm in psychology. Thomas Kuhn's ideas about the role of paradigms and their stagnation and replacement in science are applied to 20th century events in psychology -- principally the shifts from structuralist introspection to behaviourism and then to cognitive science. For heuristic purposes, I suggest that the quantitative emphasis, with its identified shortcomings, may have reached the replacement stage with so-called big-Q research as the new paradigm. Following Kuhn's analysis, I discuss the reasons why new paradigms are difficult to accept even though they may, in the end, answer questions left …