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Improving human interaction research through ecological grounding
In psychology, we tend to follow the general logic of falsificationism: we separate the ‘context of discovery’
(how we come up with theories) from the ‘context of justification’ (how we test them). However, when
studying human interaction, separating these contexts can lead to theories with low ecological validity
that do not generalize well to life outside the lab. We propose borrowing research procedures from
well-established inductive methodologies in interaction research during the process of discovering new
regularities and analyzing natural data without being led by theory. We introduce research procedures
including the use of naturalistic study settings, analytic transcription, collections of cases, and data
analysis sessions, and illustrate these with examples from a successful cross-disciplinary study. We argue
that if these procedures are used systematically and transparently throughout a research cycle, they will
lead to more robust and ecologically valid theories about interaction within psychology and, with some
adaptation, can enhance the reproducibility of research across many other areas of psychological science.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Collabra: PsychologyVolume
4Issue
1Pages
24 - 24Citation
ALBERT, S. and DE RUITER, J.P., 2018. Improving human interaction research through ecological grounding. Collabra: Psychology, 4(1): 24.Publisher
University of California PressVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Publication date
2018Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by University of California Press under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/eISSN
2474-7394Publisher version
Language
- en