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- > Critical Thinking in Psychology
- > The Case Study Perspective on Psychological Research
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- List of Contributors
- 1 The Nature and Nurture of Critical Thinking
- 2 Evaluating Experimental Research
- 3 Critical Thinking in Quasi-Experimentation
- 4 Evaluating Surveys and Questionnaires
- 5 Critical Thinking in Designing and Analyzing Research
- 6 The Case Study Perspective on Psychological Research
- 7 Informal Logical Fallacies
- 8 Designing Studies to Avoid Confounds
- 9 Evaluating Theories
- 10 Not All Experiments Are Created Equal
- 11 Making Claims in Papers and Talks
- 12 Critical Thinking in Clinical Inference
- 13 Evaluating Parapsychological Claims
- 14 Why Would Anyone Do or Believe Such a Thing?
- 15 The Belief Machine
- 16 Critical Thinking and Ethics in Psychology
- 17 Critical Thinking in Psychology
- Author Index
- Subject Index
6 - The Case Study Perspective on Psychological Research
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
The case study approach has a rich history in psychology as a method for observing the ways in which individuals may demonstrate abnormal thinking and behavior, for collecting evidence concerning the circumstances and consequences surrounding such disorders, and for providing data to generate and test models of human behavior (see Yin, 1998, for an overview). Nevertheless, the most typical methods for scientifically studying human cognition involve testing groups of healthy people – typically, college undergraduates. In their statistics and research methods courses, psychology students are trained to study the effects of manipulations that are significant across groups of participants despite considerable variation at the level of the individual. They are trained to be skeptical of reasoning from an individual case that goes against the general trend, and to be suspicious of the compelling anecdote that may be introduced to defend some position about how cognition or social interactions might work. Given this state of affairs, are the practitioners of the case study approach misguided, or can valid conclusions be drawn from findings with one patient? Can case reports that detail a client's symptoms and reactions to psychotherapy constitute scientific data? What about case studies that investigate how brain damage affects particular cognitive processes? The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how single-case-study approaches in clinical psychology and cognitive neuropsychology have contributed to the advancement of theories and models of human cognition and to address the common concerns that researchers often have about case study methodology.
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- The Case Study Perspective on Psychological Research
- By Randi Martin , Rice University, Rachel Hull , Rice University
- Edited by Robert J. Sternberg , Yale University, Connecticut , Henry L. Roediger III , Washington University, St Louis , Diane F. Halpern , Claremont McKenna College, California
- Book: Critical Thinking in Psychology
- Online publication: 05 June 2012
- Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511804632.007
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- DOI: 10.2304/plat.2002.2.2.95
- Corpus ID: 143538212
Critical Analysis of Psychological Research: Rationale and Design for a Proposed Course for the Undergraduate Psychology Curriculum
- Published 1 June 2002
- Psychology Learning & Teaching
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Critical analysis of psychological research ii: delivering a course for inclusion in the core curriculum for psychology.
- Highly Influenced
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Teaching Students to Apply a Five Stage Process to Systematically Evaluate Quantitative Psychological Research Articles
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Thematic Analysis
- Reference work entry
- pp 1947–1952
- Cite this reference work entry
- Victoria Clarke 2 &
- Virginia Braun 3
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Introduction
Empirical research within critical psychology is strongly associated with the use of qualitative methods. In the field of qualitative psychology a distinction can be made between experiential and critical approaches (Braun & Clarke, 2013 ; Reicher, 2000 ), both of which involve some kind of critique of mainstream psychology. Experiential approaches aim to capture participants’ experiences and perspectives and ground research in participants’ accounts, rather than researcher’s categories. However, these approaches view language as a reflection of “internal categories of understanding” (Reicher, p. 3), and so assume it is possible to “read off” participants’ thoughts, feelings, and practices from their use of language. By contrast, critical approaches challenge what experiential approaches have in common with mainstream psychology – the assumption that language is only of interest as a description of inner states. Critical approaches (usually some version of discourse...
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Online Resources
Braun and Clarke thematic analysis website www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/thematicanalysis . Successful qualitative research companion website http://www.uk.sagepub.com/braunandclarke/main.htm
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Department of Health and Social Sciences, University of the West of England, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol, UK
Victoria Clarke
School of Psychology, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, 1142, Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand
Virginia Braun
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Correspondence to Victoria Clarke .
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Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Clarke, V., Braun, V. (2014). Thematic Analysis. In: Teo, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_311
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IMAGES
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The pedagogical value of critical evaluation as proposed here is to be found in the achievement of a balanced and comprehensive understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of psychological research, and how in its manifestation as a published report the research process in psychology works.
A framework for a critical analysis course is described to enable students to undertake a comprehensive critical appraisal of a research article. This is based on a long-established final-year course that treats critical analysis, of published research papers, as the vehicle for training students to treat the literature with more circumspection ...
Broadly speaking, critical evaluation is the process of thinking and writing critically about the quality of the sources of evidence used to support or refute an argument. By “ evidence “, I mean the literature you cite (e.g., a journal article or book chapter).
Details of a single activity are presented to introduce undergraduate psychology students to basic critical evaluation criteria for quantitative psychological research articles and to...
Its scope can be described as ‘critical analysis of psychological research’. This is exactly what students learn to do on the course; the target material for analysis being research articles that have been published in learned journals.
The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how single-case-study approaches in clinical psychology and cognitive neuropsychology have contributed to the advancement of theories and models of human cognition and to address the common concerns that researchers often have about case study methodology. Type. Chapter. Information.
A critical review (sometimes called a critique, critical commentary, critical appraisal, critical analysis) is a detailed commentary on and critical evaluation of a text. You might carry out a critical review as a stand-alone exercise, or as part of your research and preparation for writing a literature review.
A paragraph of ‘critical evaluation’ is included after all the evidence has been presented, highlighting weaknesses in the studies reviewed. The conclusion argues that these problems limit any clear answer to the question and suggests that further research must be carried out.
Psychological critical thinking involves evaluating claims using the basic principles of psychological science. Because it is such an important skill, psychological critical thinking should be … Expand
One of the most common qualitative methods is (some form of) thematic analysis (TA); however, there is a debate about whether TA is an experiential or a critical approach, and thus an appropriate analytic method for critical psychology.