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"Historically Structured Sampling (HSS): How can Psychology's Methodology Become Tuned in to the Reality of the Historical Nature of Cultural Psychology?"

VALSINER, Jaan & SATO Tatsuya

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last update: 20151223


Historically Structured Sampling (HSS): How can Psychology's Methodology Become Tuned in to the Reality of the Historical Nature of Cultural Psychology?

VALSINER, Jaan & SATO Tatsuya
Abstract:
Cultural psychology is the new synthetic direction in contemporary psychology that brings back to psychology the crucial role of history. Cultural phenomena are historical at all levels: personal (personal life histories), that of society (history of any given society) and at the level of the microgenesis of actions. This leads to the need for new methodology. Such methodology needs to fit the nature of phenomena-which in psychology are of open systemic nature. A number of habitual empirical practices on non-historical psychology-such as random sampling and generalization from samples to populations-- are made inappropriate for science by such change. We show that "random sampling" constitutes a conceptual dead-end street that moves psychology away from-instead of towards-- adequate strategies of generalization. Instead, Historically Structured Sampling (HSS)-selection of individual cases at a currently similar setting (equifinality point) on the basis of their trajectories of past development-constitutes a constructive alternative. Some of these equifinality points are obligatory-set by the phylogeny of the species or by collective cultural construction, others-elective as possibilities created through culturally constructed activity settings. Cultural psychology allows psychologists to study the developmental processes that take place at these equifinality points-loci where social and personal worlds meet in guiding further development.


REV: 20151223
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