'Main Divisions Between Mainstream and Critical Social Psychology\r'

'One of the important divisions mingled with mainstream and slender friendly psychological science is that of the regularitys adopted. Discuss with reference to the cognitive fond and at least one early(a) kind mental linear perspective. affectionate psychology has existed for well-nigh 100 years, before which psychology was a severalise of ism. fond psychology studies mortals in their hearty contexts. It is a diverse discipline made up of many a(prenominal) theoretical perspectives and variety of several(predicate) methods atomic number 18 use in social psychological research. This assignment explores the main principles of different methods in social psychology.\r\nIt get out explore at the underlying theories or perspectives that organise contemporary social and discursive psychological research and noesis and critic every(prenominal)y evaluate different theoretical perspectives and methods. cognitive social psychology studies the information processing in dividualistic in a social context to coffin nailvass individual cognitions in harbourled social conditions. It is a quantative lift. It dominates psychological social psychology and emerged from the reappraisal of behaviourism in the mid 20th century.\r\nResearchers use an experimental arise involving controlled experimental conditions to produce quantitative data that nurse nonice be measured and analysed to produce statistic onlyy reasonable conclusions. Discursive psychology focuses on the external bena of p dispatching, its meaning and cause and studies the socially constructed, situated and possible identity. It is a qualitative turn up. It emerged in the 1970s with the lingual turn, and was influenced by sociological social psychology. Researchers use discourse depth psychology to produce qualitative data by conversational and textual analysis.\r\nPhenomenological psychology focuses on the particular translation of social populate derived through the sense s. It is a qualitative approach using the generous description of experience. It studies the national world of the capitulum in relative vistas and its effect on action using first-person write account of experience, interview and literary text. It originated in the philosophy of Husserl in the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century. companionable psychoanalytic psychology or psychosocial studies the internal world of the psyche in relational settings and its effects on actions.\r\nIt is a qualitative approach. It whole steps at the conflicted psyche in dynamic relation with the external world. employ case study and free association news report, interviews and honoring qualitative data is evaluated through interpretation of what is unverbalised as well as said. Its original learning was in the clinic and it became an argona of academic study in the late twentieth century. There atomic number 18 quad overarching storys that send word be used to interrogate a set of value issues that permeate social psychology.\r\nThese atomic number 18 known as interrogative themes and they are outline below. Power relations are central to the direction that all knowledge is produced and interpreted. Power permeates everything we do and all our relationships . Power is neither good nor bad only when it is what is done with it that determines this. Power is relational and the balance changes in different contexts. It is contextual and situated rather than absolute. Questions of occasion were first awakend in relation to the lying of participants in the name of science.\r\nFor example in Stanley Milgram’s (1965) experiment where participants were required to give increasing levels of voltaic shock to Milgram’s colleagues who posed as recipients of the electric car shocks. The focus was on force relations amongst the scientist and participants, many of whom performed, as they believed, harmful and sadistic acts on the instructions of t he scientist. Ethical guidelines in social psychology postulate been hugely influenced by this. The question of who has the cater to interpret great deal’s experiences applies to all social psychological research.\r\nWe need to be careful how we mean interpretations on evidence, and we must interrogate how that evidence and those meanings came to be produced: inside what assumptions and power relations. Power relations raise the issue of the relationship surrounded by the researcher and the participants. another(prenominal) interrogative theme is situated knowledges. Knowledge always comes from a effect or view dit Knowledge is always situated somewhere and sometime(prenominal) †it changes with time and is situated in terms of values, cultures, belief systems and history. It changes with social change.\r\nKnowledge production needs to be situated at the level of every tack together of research. Methods are highly influential in the knowledges that are produced. Another interrogative theme is individual-society dualism. The most suffer theme in social psychology is whether individual or society is privileged in the commentary of social psychological phenomena and derives from the wider dualism of storys that have characterised western legal opinion since the Enlightenment. Individual-society dualism often manifested in a reduction of explanation to either biological (often genetic) or social causes.\r\nsometimes ‘both/and’ explanations also suffer form this dualism because they have a bun in the oven as if there is no other level of explanation, only an ‘interaction’ amidst biological and social factors. Genuinely social psychological explanations get squeezed out. Agency- anatomical structure dualism is the equate problem of individual-social dualism. The binary terms ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ mirror the terms ‘individual’ and ‘society’ in the following wa y: if individuals are seen as relatively independent of social influence, they can be theorised as agents of their own destinies.\r\nOn the other hand, if social structures are overwhelmingly influential in individual action, people’s choices and desires would be irrelevant. Traditional social possible action placed such emphasis on the power of social structures in governing peoples actions that this led to egotism determinism. A challenge for social psychology is to be able to understand the dynamic tension between desires and actions that are relatively free and ones that are firmly constrained by circumstances, rather than fall into assumptions on either side of the agency-structure binary.\r\nThis interrogative theme entrust help us remain aware of dangers which, same individual-society dualism, have strong political and ethical implications. either of these interrogative themes are useful in evaluating social psychological research and theories. There are differe nces and similarities between the four perspectives on social psychology that have been defined in this essay. They all have reflexiveness because the researchers are prepared to put themselves in the furnish of knowledge production. They are all explicit nearly the way their approach is appropriate to the object of analysis.\r\nA difference between the qualitative and quantitative approach 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 antecedently hidden form view through rich description. In contrast, discourse analysis is not fire in underlying significance but in words.\r\nWhereas discourse analysis is interested in sense terms, soc ial psychoanalysis looks for emotions themselves , while the object of phenomenological analysis is the emotions that people are aware of and can indeed 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. Control of the research setting is the issue that most clearly differentiates quantitative and qualitative approaches. data-based psychology ‘models’ social processes in rate to control them.\r\nThe other three approaches seek ecological validity by researching in social settings. inside the qualitative approaches there are differences in emphasis. communication 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 ove rarching theme in qualitative social psychology, partly because of the critique of unstructured interview techniques on the grounds that they bring down the terms in which participants can give their accounts.\r\nWhen 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 guardian’s story published on 24 May 2004 about an Iraqi family, a get an her children. The woman’s husband ( the children’s father) had died in detention during the American/British invasion and the newspaper quoted the woman’s response †‘I will always hate you people’.\r\nThe 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 causative relations and patterns among variables that ma y not be apparent to the naked eye. Whist acknowledging that we cannot make in the lab the conditions that foster 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.\r\nFree association interviewing is used to reach beyond the structured interviewing that dominates qualitative research and risks limit interviewees with assumptions provided by questions. Derek Edwards discussion of discursive social psychology proposes looking at the report 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 build implications for politics and policy. This approach examines how people deploy commonsense psychological ideas.\r\nDarren Langridge explores phenomenological social psychology as a descriptive ente rprise. data is collected though first person written accounts or interviews. The rush towards explanation is avoided. The aim is to fall upon structural qualities that are invariant across the experience, as well as those that are more idiosyncratic, guidance 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.\r\nEach approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and all can contribute to the continuing 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 retain 1, Chapter 2 by Wendy Hollway, Book 2, Chapter 1 (Introductions) †Open University Press. DVD 1 Social Psychology : Critical Perspectives on Self and Others.\r\n'