Phenomenon-driven research and systematic research assembling: Methodological conceptualisations for psychology’s epistemic projects

• Published in: Theory & psychology Vol. 29; no. 4; pp. 539 - 558
• Main Authors: Huniche, Lotte, Sørensen, Estrid
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.08.2019; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Epistemology; Legitimacy; Methods; Psychology; Research methodology; research methods; practice theory; subject matter; intra-action; science and technology studies
• ISSN: 0959-3543; 1461-7447
• DOI: 10.1177/0959354319862048

This article contributes to psychology’s epistemic project by proposing a methodology that foregrounds the relation between research methods and subject matter. Considering method-driven and subject-driven approaches as being opposite poles of a continuum, the science of psychology has historically tended toward emphasising one or the other. Method-driven approaches claim legitimacy through an emphasis on a unifying standardised method, while subject-driven approaches insist on human-centred conceptions of psychology’s subject matter. Both poles are accompanied by one-sided methods-to-matter relations which limit the ways in which phenomena can be known in surprising and unforeseen ways. Phenomenon-driven research conceptualises the engagement with methods and matter as mutually intra-acting. Systematic research assembling points to the practical crafting of research activities through ongoing engagement with how phenomena can be known through intra-action. In our time of particularly unsettled, changing, and complex phenomena, psychology’s epistemic projects need methodologies that aim at ways of knowing that can bring out the unexpected.