Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue: Using Story Completion Methods in Qualitative Research

ABSTRACT

What is story completion? How come I’ve never heard of it? Can it be useful for me as a qualitative researcher? A relatively unknown method for qualitative data collection, story completion has a long history of use in psychotherapy practice and (quantitative) developmental psychology research. We believe it has untapped, exciting potential as a qualitative technique in and beyond psychology, offering something quite different to many of the popular methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups). In this article, an introduction to an exciting Special Issue that discusses and demonstrates the potential of story completion, we provide a brief history of the development of story completion as a qualitative technique and an overview of design, sampling, and data analysis in story completion research. We finish by highlighting potential pitfalls of story completion, alongside a discussion of the possibilities it offers, and briefly introduce the empirical papers in the Special Issue.     

Appraisals of dependent stressor controllability and severity are associated with depression and anxiety symptoms in youth

Background and objectives: Stress is well established as a strong risk factor for internalizing psychopathology. Learned helplessness research demonstrates that perceived controllability of stressors affects internalizing symptoms. Furthermore, subjective perceived stress is associated with psychopathology. However, most recent research has focused on measuring the frequency and expert-rated severity of stressful life events despite evidence for the importance of stress perceptions. The present study brings together past and current literatures to investigate the importance of perceived severity and controllability of recent life events in the association between stressors and internalizing symptoms.

Design and methods: We used a revised version of the Adolescent Life Events Questionnaire (ALEQ) that asked participants (ages 13–22, N?=?328) to rate the frequency of 65 stressful events typical to youth, as well as the perceived stressfulness and control they felt over each event. Events were categorized prior to analysis as dependent (self-generated), independent (fateful) or neither.

Results: Controllability and severity appraisals were associated with depression and anxiety symptoms, controlling for stressor frequency (which also predicted symptoms), for dependent but not independent stressors.

Conclusions: These results highlight the importance of controllability and severity appraisals as potential risk factors for internalizing disorders, exposing a potential target for therapy.     

Perceiving the language of films.

Children appear to be familiar with the language of film makers or at least to perceive and remember films less well when the rules of this cinematic language are broken. In this experiment a simple action sequence filmed from a static viewpoint was made up into two films of four shots. One film was edited according to the rules of directional continuity specified by Hollywood cinema, that is the four shots were presented so as to preserve the subject's direction of movement across cuts. The other film was edited disregarding these rules. Apart from this difference both films were identical. Children aged seven, nine, and thirteen years watched either of these films and reconstructed the action using pictures representing the four shots. The children who saw the conventional version were better able to reconstruct what they had seen than those who saw the unconventional version.     

The Role of Visual Feedback about Motion of the Ground on Postural Sway

Abstract

We asked whether body sway would be influenced by visual information about motion of the ground surface. On a ship at sea, standing participants performed a demanding visual search task or a simple visual inspection task. Display content was stationary relative to the ship or relative to the Earth. Participants faced the ship’s bow or its port side. Performance on the visual search task was representative of terrestrial studies. Body sway was greater during viewing of the Earth Stationary displays than during viewing of the Ship Stationary displays. We discuss possible implications of these results for theoretical and applied issues.     

Feature representations and analytic/nonanalytic processing.

Lee Brooks' original formulation of instance theory embedded the notion of an instance within the larger conception of a distinction between analytic and nonanalytic processing. Brooks has recently argued that features can be represented either in terms of their specific feature appearance, or in terms of the abstract information some particular instantiation embodies. This work reviews some recent studies that link reliance on different types of feature representations to different decision-making processes, and to different patterns of categorization behaviour. This in turn complicates the analytic/nonanalytic distinction, suggesting a more precise reformulation.