The relationship between qualitative and quantitative research: Lessons from feminist psychology

The dominant methodological approach in psychological research has involved the use of quantitative methods within a positivist framework. In this article we argue that both qualitative and quantitative methods have their strengths and limitations, depending on the research question under investigation. We examine some of the advantages of qualitative methods, paying particular attention to the value of such methods for feminist researchers. We challenge the positivist assumption that all research should be apolitical and value-free, arguing that the political context in which all research studies take place plays an important role in decisions about the appropriate research methods to use. Despite the value attached to qualitative methods by feminist researchers, there may be projects for which quantitative methods, or a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques, are more suitable. We draw on examples from our research on the transition from school to the job market for young people, and a study of 16- to 19-year-old first time mothers to illustrate these points, examining the practical implications of our arguments for applied social psychology research.     

MouseTracker: Software for studying real-time mental processing using a computer mouse-tracking method

In the present article, we present a software package, MouseTracker, that allows researchers to use a computer mouse-tracking method for assessing real-time processing in psychological tasks. By recording the streaming x-, y-coordinates of the computer mouse while participants move the mouse into one of multiple response alternatives, motor dynamics of the hand can reveal the time course of mental processes. MouseTracker provides researchers with fine-grained information about the real-time evolution of participant responses by sampling 60–75 times/sec the online competition between multiple response alternatives. MouseTracker allows researchers to develop and run experiments and subsequently analyze mouse trajectories in a user-interactive, graphics-based environment. Experiments may incorporate images, letter strings, and sounds. Mouse trajectories can be processed, averaged, visualized, and explored, and measures of spatial attraction/curvature, complexity, velocity, and acceleration can be computed. We describe the software and the method, and we provide details on mouse trajectory analysis. We validate the software by demonstrating the accuracy and reliability of its trajectory and reaction time data. The latest version of MouseTracker is freely available at http://mousetracker.jbfreeman.net.     

The metabolic mind: A role for leptin and ghrelin in affect and social cognition

Leptin and ghrelin are metabolic hormones central to energy regulation in the body. Theories of allostasis suggest that metabolism could matter for more than just food intake and weight regulation but also ultimately for psychological processes, such as affect and social cognition. Allostasis is the process by which the brain monitors ongoing physiological states and, in turn, regulates physiology based on expectations about how a given situation will impact the self. Motivated by this allostatic perspective, we argue that leptin and ghrelin may be influenced by and even contribute to psychological processes such as affect and social cognition. Specifically, we review literature suggesting that leptin and ghrelin may be sensitive to social affective signals and related contexts (e.g., social status, and social threat vs. support), given that these signals and contexts may represent access to tangible physical and psychological resources that support allostasis and metabolic needs. We then review literature showing that leptin, ghrelin, and associated metabolic states may feed into the construction of social affective states and behaviors (e.g., emotion and risk taking), in order to motivate behaviors in line with allostatic needs. We close by offering guidelines for researchers interested in contributing to this emerging field and highlight opportunities for future research. We believe that leptin and ghrelin offer exciting new directions for social and affective scientists interested in linking the mind, brain, and body.     

Photography and Social Media Use in Community‐Based Participatory Research with Youth: Ethical Considerations

Community‐based participatory researchers increasingly incorporate photography and social media into their work. Despite its relative infancy, social media has created a powerful network that allows individuals to convey messages quickly to a widespread audience. In addition to its potential benefits, the use of social media in research also carries risk, given the fast pace of exchanges, sharing of personal images and ideas in high accessibility, low privacy contexts and continually shifting options and upgrades. This article contributes to the literature examining ethical considerations for photography and social media use in community‐based participatory research. We describe three key ethical dilemmas that we encountered during our participatory photography project with Latina/o youth: (a) use and content of images and risk; (b) incentives and coercion; and (c) social media activity and confidentiality. We provide our responses to these challenges, contextualized in theory and practice, and share lessons learned. We raise the question of how to contend with cultural shifts in boundaries and privacy. We propose that evaluating participant vulnerability versus potential empowerment may be more fitting than the standard approach of assessing risks and benefits. Finally, we recommend upholding the principles of participatory research by co‐producing ethical practices with one's participants.     

Understanding the Complexity of Everyday Interethnic Contact: Recommendations for Researchers

Interethnic contact has long been a focus of social psychological research, and in this article, we provide some recommendations about how to study interethnic social contact. Our primary recommendation is that researchers should study interethnic contact more in vivo to complement single assessment surveys and laboratory research, sometimes of arbitrarily defined groups, with more naturalistic research and with research involving groups that exist in the real world. This recommendation is based in part on the limitations of surveys and laboratory methods and in part on the advantages provided by what are referred to as intensive repeated measures designs, methods that have proven to be useful in studying other topics. We discuss these limitations and the relative advantages of different types of intensive repeated measures methods for the study of interethnic contact and provide some recommendations for their use. Finally, regardless of how they study interethnic contact, researchers need to expand the focus of their questions, increase the sensitivity of the data they collect, and increase the ethnic diversity of the samples they study.     

A Regression Framework for Causal Mediation Analysis with Applications to Behavioral Science

We introduce and extend the classical regression framework for conducting mediation analysis from the fit of only one model. Using the essential mediation components (EMCs) allows us to estimate causal mediation effects and their analytical variance. This single-equation approach reduces computation time and permits the use of a rich suite of regression tools that are not easily implemented on a system of three equations. Additionally, we extend this framework to non-nested mediation systems, provide a joint measure of mediation for complex mediation hypotheses, propose new visualizations for mediation effects, and explain why estimates of the total effect may differ depending on the approach used. Using data from social science studies, we also provide extensive illustrations of the usefulness of this framework and its advantages over traditional approaches to mediation analysis. The example data are freely available for download online and we include the R code necessary to reproduce our results.     

Wearable computing: Will it make people prosocial?

We recently reported that people who wear an eye tracker modify their natural looking behaviour in a prosocial manner. This change in looking behaviour represents a potential concern for researchers who wish to use eye trackers to understand the functioning of human attention. On the other hand, it may offer a real boon to manufacturers and consumers of wearable computing (e.g., Google Glass), for if wearable computing causes people to behave in a prosocial manner, then the public's fear that people with wearable computing will invade their privacy is unfounded. Critically, both of these divergent implications are grounded on the assumption that the prosocial behavioural effect of wearing an eye tracker is sustained for a prolonged period of time. Our study reveals that on the very first wearing of an eye tracker, and in less than 10 min, the prosocial effect of an eye tracker is abolished, but by drawing attention back to the eye tracker, the implied presence effect is easily reactivated. This suggests that eye trackers induce a transient social presence effect, which is rendered dormant when attention is shifted away from the source of implied presence. This is good news for researchers who use eye trackers to measure attention and behaviour; and could be bad news for advocates of wearable computing in everyday life.     

Encompassing experience: Meanings and methods in health psychology

Abstract

Health psychology is limited by its almost exclusive use of a positivist quantitative research paradigm, and the adoption and use of qualitative methods by health psychologists will provide increased understandings of health and illness. Qualitative methods provide a means to incorporate the social world into our research, and furnish ways to investigate the meanings of health and illness experience. We present a brief consideration of the qualitative paradigm and some important underlying issues related to its use. We describe three qualitative approaches - grounded theory, narrative analysis, and discourse analysis - chosen for their relevance and diversity. We provide illustrations of the use of each in health research, and suggest how these approaches could be utilised by health psychologists to enrich understanding in the health field. We conclude that health psychologists have a great deal to gain from joining other social science health researchers in adopting qualitative approaches in their research.     

Social laws in alternating time: effectiveness,feasibility, and synthesis

Since it was first proposed by Moses, Shoham, and Tennenholtz, the social laws paradigm has proved to be one of the most compelling approaches to the offline coordination of multiagent systems. In this paper, we make four key contributions to the theory and practice of social laws in multiagent systems. First, we show that the Alternating-time Temporal Logic (atl) of Alur, Henzinger, and Kupferman provides an elegant and powerful framework within which to express and understand social laws for multiagent systems. Second, we show that the effectiveness, feasibility, and synthesis problems for social laws may naturally be framed as atl model checking problems, and that as a consequence, existing atl model checkers may be applied to these problems. Third, we show that the complexity of the feasibility problem in our framework is no more complex in the general case than that of the corresponding problem in the Shoham–Tennenholtz framework (it is np-complete). Finally, we show how our basic framework can easily be extended to permit social laws in which constraints on the legality or otherwise of some action may be explicitly required. We illustrate the concepts and techniques developed by means of a running example. This paper was presented at the Social Software conference in May 2004, Copenhagen, organised by PHILOG. We thank the organisers for providing the opportunity, and the participants for their useful feedback.     

The Road Not Taken: Fostering Research on the Psychology of Religiosity and Spirituality via Underused Representative,Open-Access Datasets (ROADs)

Psychologists studying religiosity and spirituality (R/S) often face several challenges when conducting their research, such as collecting data from nationally representative samples, cross-cultural generalizability, statistical power, and integrated multilevel approaches. We examined one potential solution—the use of Representative, Open-Access Datasets (ROADs), which are currently underutilized. In this article, we define ROADs; discuss affordances, obstacles, and best practices in using them; document the R/S variables available in various waves of ongoing ROADs collection efforts; and delineate ways to increase usage of ROADs as a research tool in the future. This will enhance the capability of psychologists to address theory-driven questions and to better understand the role of R/S in everyday life, including social attitudes, health, and well-being, as well as social change, cohesion, and conflict. Looking forward, we recommend (a) adding more, and more nuanced, variables to future ROADs data collection efforts; (b) publishing more frequently using ROADs data; and (c) conducting workshops to promote the use of ROADs and to train researchers in secondary data analysis techniques.     

Social relations of sexually abused children: A social information processing analysis

The implications of sexual abuse for the child’s interpersonal functioning and environment have been insufficiently understood, and this has repercussions that may limit comprehensive assessment and effective treatment. We suggest that clinicians and researchers need to address the new social challenges that may confront a sexually abused child. A social information processing model and its implications for therapy, and understanding the social difficulties of the sexually abused child, is presented.     

Identifying g: A review of current factor analytic practices in the science of mental abilities

Factor analysis is arguably one of the most important tools in the science of mental abilities. While many studies have been conducted to make recommendations regarding “best practices” concerning its use, it is unknown the degree to which contemporary ability researchers abide by those standards. The current study sought to evaluate the typical practices of contemporary ability researchers. We analyzed articles reporting factor analyses of cognitive ability tests administered to adult samples over a 12 year period. Results suggest that, in aggregate, the science of mental abilities seems to be doing well with respect to the issues of sample size, number of indicators (relative to number of factors) and breadth of indicators. Further, our results suggest that the majority of ability researchers are using methods of factor analysis that allow for the identification of a g factor. However, 14.57% failed to use a method that allowed a common factor to emerge. These results provide insights regarding the methodological quality of the science of mental abilities, and will hopefully encourage further “introspective” research into the science of mental abilities.     

An introduction to hearing loss and screening procedures for behavioral research

Hearing loss is a confounding variable that is rarely addressed in behavioral research despite its prevalence across the life span. Currently, the most common method of experimental control over hearing acuity is through self report of perceived impairment. We argue that this technique may lack sensitivity and that researchers should more commonly utilize standardized hearing screening procedures. Distinctive patterns of hearing loss are reviewed with attention to populations that commonly participate in behavioral research. We explain standard techniques for conducting pure tone hearing screening using a conventional portable audiometer and outline a procedure for how researchers can modify a conventional laptop computer for audiometric screening when a standard audiometer is unavailable. We offer a sample hearing screening program that researchers may use toward the development of their own protocol. This program is freely available for download at www .psychonomic.org/archive.     

Ethical Considerations when Employing Fake Identities in Online Social Networks for Research

Online social networks (OSNs) have rapidly become a prominent and widely used service, offering a wealth of personal and sensitive information with significant security and privacy implications. Hence, OSNs are also an important—and popular—subject for research. To perform research based on real-life evidence, however, researchers may need to access OSN data, such as texts and files uploaded by users and connections among users. This raises significant ethical problems. Currently, there are no clear ethical guidelines, and researchers may end up (unintentionally) performing ethically questionable research, sometimes even when more ethical research alternatives exist. For example, several studies have employed “fake identities” to collect data from OSNs, but fake identities may be used for attacks and are considered a security issue. Is it legitimate to use fake identities for studying OSNs or for collecting OSN data for research? We present a taxonomy of the ethical challenges facing researchers of OSNs and compare different approaches. We demonstrate how ethical considerations have been taken into account in previous studies that used fake identities. In addition, several possible approaches are offered to reduce or avoid ethical misconducts. We hope this work will stimulate the development and use of ethical practices and methods in the research of online social networks.     

Transformative Theory in Social and Organizational Research

In social and organizational research, theory is conventionally used to explain social phenomena. However, theory may be transformative in the sense that in using and testing the theory in a practical domain, researchers may attempt to help practitioners transform and improve their social practices and institutions. This idea is illustrated by a research-and-development project in Denmark, headed by the author, which used transformative theory to design professional conferences that are more conducive to participant learning and involvement than is the conventional, lecture-based format. A number of learning techniques were derived from the theory and were tested as hypotheses: When implemented in thirty live conference experiments, did they contribute to learning, as specified by the theory? Used in this manner, transformative theory may supplement the aspirations motivating change agents by some of the well-known qualities of scientific research, including theoretical grounding, a coherent ontology, testable hypotheses, systematic evaluation, external validity, and theory–action consistency.     

Quest for Significance and Violent Extremism: The Case of Domestic Radicalization

In the present study, we applied the quest for significance model of radicalization to explain the use of political violence. According to the model, when people experience loss of personal significance (e.g., due to social rejection, achievement failures, or abuse) the motivation to restore significance may push them toward the use of extreme means. We tested this prediction in a sample of individuals who have committed ideologically motivated crimes in the United States (n = 1496). We found that experiences of economic and social loss of significance were separate and positive predictors related to the use of violence by perpetrators of ideologically motivated crimes. We also found evidence that the presence of radicalized others (friends but not family members) in the individuals' social network increased their likelihood of using violence.     

Ethical Decision Making and Research Deception in the Behavioral Sciences: An Application of Social Contract Theory

Despite significant ethical advances in recent years, including professional developments in ethical review and codification, research deception continues to be a pervasive practice and contentious focus of debate in the behavioral sciences. Given the disciplines' generally stated ethical standards regarding the use of deceptive procedures, researchers have little practical guidance as to their ethical acceptability in specific research contexts. We use social contract theory to identify the conditions under which deception may or may not be morally permissible and formulate practical recommendations to guide researchers on the ethical employment of deception in behavioral science research.     

Priming as a way of understanding children’s mental representations of the social world

Priming is a well established tool for experimental examination of how mental representations drive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that has been widely used in adult research. Priming is also a well established technique in cognitive development research. Social development research, however, has rarely used priming as a research method despite evidence that this technique is promising for helping researchers untangle causal connections between children’s mental representations and children’s social development outcomes. This paper discusses how priming methods may yield important insights into the role that children’s mental representations of the social world play in children’s social functioning. We begin by discussing the theoretical conceptualization underlying priming and priming methods. We next review evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of priming techniques in child development research. We conclude by suggesting ways in which priming can inform future research in social development using research examining attachment, social-information-processing, gender development, and mood and mental health as examples.     

How differences in perceptions of own and team performance impact trust and job satisfaction in virtual teams

Employees frequently engage in social comparison processes and tend to perceive their own performance as superior compared to that of their peers. We expect this to be particularly salient in virtual teams where employees receive few cues upon which the comparison with other members of their team can be based. With reliance on social comparison and social exchange theory, we propose that such “perceived overperformance” has negative effects on job satisfaction, which is mediated by trust in the team. We confirm this with a sample of field-service employees (n = 753) using structural equation modeling with bootstrapping. We corroborated our findings in focus groups, which suggest the need for performance indicators that are easily communicated to and comprehended by employees to maintain trust and satisfaction.