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The role of the individual subject in scientific psychology has always been a controversial issue in psychology. Throughout the aim of the present volume was to analyze some of the theoretical and methodological sides of that issue, and to bring together psychologists from different fields who have attempted to work out research techniques that are based on individual subjects. The contributors to this book emphasized different aspects of the role of the individual subject, and suggested various ways of constructing basic knowledge in our discipline on the basis of individual subjects’ data. These ways ranged from an emphasis on the integration of idiographic and nomothetic research approaches (Walsch-burger, Grossmann) to the separation of the two approaches, depending on whether the given field is aimed at explanation of the generalized (individual) system, or a population of such systems (chapters by Cairns, Valsiner, Thorngate). Furthermore, the contributors expressed widely different opinions on the role of statistical methodologies in the study of individual subjects—ranging from the innovative use of traditional methods (Walschburger, Thoman, and Rogoff & Gauvain) to the need for devising novel methodology (Dywan & Segalowitz and Mace & Kratochwill), and further to the need for preserving the integrity of the psychological phenomena, whatever methods are being used (Cairns, Ginsburg, Valsiner). Going beyond ordinary single-case statistical methodology, Thorn-gate and Carroll outlined a strategy for comparison of hypotheses that can be applied to individual subjects. Grossmann and Franck outlined the historical side of the issue of inference from individual subjects. The issue that is of concern to the contributors to the present volume has been in the center of attention of psychologists and philosophers in the past. It has been discussed; psychologists have fought over it to prove their claim for the scientific nature of their points of view (e.g., Allport, 1940, 1946; Holt, 1962; Skaggs, 1945, and others, discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 in this volume)—and after a while the whole issue was abandoned as a topic, until another generation of psychologists picked it up again. Such episodic interest in the role of the individual subject in psychology illustrates how psychologists’ social environment guides scientists in their efforts to explain psychological phenomena (Buss, 1978; Flanagan, 1981; Gergen, 1973, 1982). Unfortunately, the issue itself has remained unsolved, and much dispute around it has facilitated selective forgetting of what had been actually said by our predecessors (see Grossmann’s chapter for details).

The purpose of classification of mental disorders is to facilitate diagnosis. To diagnose means to discern, to find out to what extent a particular disease, disorder, or dysfunction differs from other diseases, disorders, or dysfunctions, and what it has in common with similar ones. Every single case is unique, that is, an idiophenomenon, because it is a disease or a disorder of a particular person at a particular period of time. However, if it shares certain characteristics with other cases, these common characteristics permit putting them together into categories or classes and form general nomothetic conclusions.

One of the hardiest perennial weeds in psychology’s conceptual garden is the notion that there are nomothetic (generalizing) and idiographic (individualizing) branches, types, or emphases of science. Many respected and important contributors to psychology—especially to personology, the psychology of personality—have quoted these terms with respect and have used them as if they contributed something useful to methodology (e.g., Allport, 1937a; Beck, 1953; Bellak, 1956; Bertalanffy, 1951; Colby, 1958; Dymond, 1953; Falk, 1956; Hoffman, 1960; Sarbin, 1944; Stephenson, 1953; the list could be considerably extended). It is the purpose of this essay to examine the historical origins of this cumbersome pair of concepts, their logical implications, the reasons psychologists espouse them, and alternative solutions to the underlying problems. In so doing, I hope—no doubt fondly, but none the less ardently—to lay this Teutonic ghost which haunts and confounds much of modern psychology.

A naturalistic study, with two purposes, was conducted to evaluate communication between staff and retarded persons in an institutional and in a community setting. The first purpose was to determine the natural rates of attention from staff in the form of instructions. Results showed that verbal instruction was the most prevalent (67%) followed by verbal instruction with physical assistance (12%), nonverbal instruction with physical assistance (10%), nonverbal instruction (6%), and physical assistance (5%). The second purpose was to determine the relative effectiveness of each of these types of instructions. Results showed that although verbal instruction was the most common, it was not the most effective, being surpassed by nonverbal instruction and nonverbal instruction with physical assistance. Results were discussed in terms of (a) their relation to prior research, (b) their use as nomothetic data to provide initial instruction modes, and (c) their use with specific persons on whom individual data have been collected.

Sammary.-Historically statistical tests of significance have not permitted determination of whether the trials effect (learning) differs reliably across learners. A common statistical test, analysis of variance, can ordinarily only be used to assess whether the trials effect varies across experimental treatments. However, the learning situation can be so rearranged that reliable individual differences in learning can be statistically evaluated. The proposed arrangement is such that learning materials, rather than learner, is the randomization unit. An illustration of the use of analysis of variance to evaluate individual differences in learning, when the learning setting is rearranged, is given. The typical laboratory study of learning can be summarized as follows. Each of a group of individuals is presented the same task on a series of occasions or trials, with a test of knowledge of the task being administered after each trial. Performance for each trial is the average of the individual performances for the trial. Subsequent to averaging, a statistical test is applied to see if the trial means differ reliably. Pr'esence of a statistically significant trials effect defines learning. A practitioner in educational settings may argue that laboratory investigations of learning are of little use on the grounds that the average trials effect is not representative of the individual learner of concern. The characteristic ignoring of individual differences in learning in laboratory studies (behavior-modification research excepted) is acknowledged, although we should point out that quantitative psychologists are ordinarily aware of the problem and have techniques for dealing with it. We shall first give some reasons for the historical lack of concern with individual differences. Also we will suggest a general requirement which must be met before individual differences in learning can be statistically assessed. A description will be provided of how a learning situation can be arranged so that individual differences can be .tested for reliability with an analysis of variance test of significance. The main historical precedent for the failure to study individual differences in learning has been the implicit adoption of the nomothetic assumption. The assumption is that the average learning curve adequately describes the learning of the individual. Individual deviations from the group learning curve supposedly represent momentary fluctuations of the individual. The fluctuations are presumed to be random and independent from learner to learner. Hence, the fluctuations cancel one another to yield the average learning curve. Sidman (1960) may be consulted for arguments counter to the nomothetic assumption. The second precedent (cf. Leicht, 1972) is that statistical tests

Clinical medicine is the application of scientific principles, rules of thumb, and a store of practical wisdom embodied in narratives of individual cases to the care of a person who is ill. Physicians are taught to observe and report the individual case both as a means of fitting nomothetic generalizations to the given circumstances and as a way of refining those generalizations. This narrative construction of illness is a principal way of knowing in medicine. In this view, disease is not so much an entity as an identifiable chronological organization of the events of illness, and medicine, rather than a science, a rational science-using activity in the service of the ill.

While British ethnographers were busy reacting to the exaggerated induction of the historical particularists, new developments were taking place in America. During the 1920s and 1930s, a number of researchers, inspired by the linguist Edward Sapir, became interested in investigating relationships between the individual and culture. Although this concern differentiated this school from the British social anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown (although not from the psychological functionalism of Malinowski), there were several points of similarity between them. According to Langness (1974:85), both structural-functionalism and culture and personality studies “attempted to be scientific and nomothetic as opposed to historical and idiographic. They also attempted to consider wholes rather than merely parts. And they were avowedly theoretical.” Along with Sapir, a number of anthropologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists have come to be associated with the culture and personality approach, including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Abram Kardiner, Ralph Linton, Cora DuBois, Geza Roheim, Erik H. Erikson, Clyde Kluckhohn, Francis L. K. Hsu, John W. M. and Beatrice Whiting, Melford Spiro, Anthony F. C. Wallace, and Robert LeVine.

This short paper by Shectman goes over much that has been covered in the previous papers, but it presents a useful organization of the contrasts and similarities between an operant conditioning approach and psychoanalysis in terms of the data employed, the use of theory, the balance between idiographic and nomothetic factors, the role of continuity, views of etiology, and technique. An important additional point that Shectman makes is about the different conceptions of man involved in the two orientations, i.e., one that sees man as being guided, regulated, and molded entirely by outside forces, and one that puts more emphasis on internalized regulatory controls. Like the preceding authors, Shectman asserts that each approach enriches the other and pleads for efforts to achieve integration between them.

The apparent dichotomy between attempts to establish psychology on the basis of universal laws on the one hand, and psychology as an area that tries to concentrate on individual life courses on the other hand, has had a long tradition in philosophy. The dichotomy has been called spurious by Franck (Chapter 1, this volume), because one side must supplement the other for the only possible “idiographic-nomothetic symbiosis in psychology as a science” (Franck, p. 19).

This chapter aims to present a materialist conceptual scheme for the nomothetic study of behavioral change and to raise the possibility (largely by implication) that the paradigm archaeologists seem to be assembling for explaining change requires a fundamental overhaul (see Reid 1973). This chapter aspires to advance beyond a cautionary tale by furnishing specific suggestions as to how the laws of behavioral change might be sought. Regrettably, no principles are provided here, but a framework is developed that may help investigators to formulate appropriate nomothetic questions and to design research for answering them. The discussion begins with a general treatment of behavioral systems and change from the standpoint of “activity analysis.” Elementary postulates are proposed and some of their implications for understanding change processes are explored. On the basis of these considerations, an analytic decision-making model is presented for organizing the study of behavioral change. A partially completed example illustrates the use of this framework. It is concluded that discovery of the laws of change will require that new directions of inquiry be pursued using diverse sources of data.

I Philosophical Orientations.- 1 Art Versus Science as Ways of Generating Knowledge About Materialism.- Traditional Antipathy of Art and Science.- Applications of Art to Materialism.- How Do Art and Science Differ as Approaches to Knowledge?.- Art's Potential Contributions to Consumer Behavior.- Conclusion.- 2 Implications from the "Old" and the "New" Physics for Studying Buyer Behavior.- Psychology as a Traditional Science.- The Influence of Marketing.- Goals of the "Old" Science.- Implications from the "New" Science.- Affect, Cognition, and Purchasing Intention.- Conclusion.- II Analytic Strategies.- 3 An Idiothetic Analysis of Behavioral Decision Making.- Limitations of Nomothetic Treatment of Data.- An Idiothetic Approach to Behavioral Decision Making.- Concluding Remarks.- 4 Building Consumer Behavior Models with LISREL: Issues in Applications.- The LISREL Model.- Applications.- Application 1: Validity Assessment and the Attitude-Behavior Relationship.- Application 2: Inequality Constraints.- Application 3: MTMM Data.- Issues and Caveats in Applications.- Issue 1: Do We Really Believe Our Models?.- Issue 2: Empirical Identification.- Issue 3: Offending Estimate.- Issue 4: Interpretational Confounding.- Concluding Remarks.- 5 Meta-Analysis: Techniques for the Quantitative Integration of Research Findings.- Integrating Research Findings: A Brief Historical Review.- Increasing Our Confidence and Understanding in a Research Finding.- Quantitative Procedures.- Summary and Conclusions.- 6 Social Interaction Data: Procedural and Analytic Strategies.- Social Interaction Research in Marketing and Consumer Behavior.- Observational Coding Systems.- Analytic Strategies for Social Interaction Data.- Using Social Interaction Data for Theory Development.- III Applications.- 7 Expanding the Ontology and Methodology of Research on the Consumption Experience.- The Consumption Experience.- Ontology: An Expanded Model of the Consumption Experience.- Systemic Inter-Relationships and Overlaps in the Consumption Experience.- Methodology: Some Extensions in Techniques for Studying the Consumption Experience.- Conclusion.- 8 A Theory of the Inductive Learning of Multiattribute Preferences.- Theory.- Discussion.- Appendix 1. The Pattern Recognition Algorithm.- Appendix 2. The Evaluation Algorithm.- Author Index.

According to Windelband (1894), nomothetic sciences search for general laws and are trying to explain nature. Idiographic sciences aim for an understanding of social situations or individuals in their uniqueness and do not attempt to generalize these descriptions.

We study the equation r3 (t)z = lz where r(t) is a periodic function of t, r(t) = 0 for t = 0. This equation arises in the variational equation for the nomothetic solutions, the only explicitely known solutions of triple collision. We use a transformed form, namely a singular Ince equation, and give the theory by means of periodic solutions developed in Fourier series. We compare with the other forms given by Waldvogel and Mac Gehee.

The observed variations in network characteristics demand explanation. In this discussion it is possible to identify two types of explanation and two levels of aggregation. The two types of explanation can be characterised as idiographic (or historical) and nomothetic (or law-making). The two levels of aggregation are the network element (an individual route or access point) and the network as a whole. Although the historical approach is most commonly applied to network elements and the nomothetic approach to whole networks, there is no necessary relation between the level of aggregation and the type of explanation advanced.

It is a common observation in methodological writings that a scientist can expend a given amount of intellectual effort in several ways. A scientist’s knowledge is said to be abstract or concrete,1 broad or deep, theoretical or observational, typifying or individualizing, specialistic or universalistic, nomothetic or idiographic, more or less balanced, strong or weak in terms of the total intellectual effort.

Publisher Summary Historians as a body have done little to clarify the position of their work in relation to science and to scientific method. Their attitude for the most part is that of craftsmen, who are suspicious of theory and are perfectly satisfied with the product of their trade. Social scientists are prepared to manipulate historical data in ways that historians regard as illegitimate. It is impossible to criticize these arguments and assumptions in detail. Nevertheless, it may be questioned whether the underlying dichotomy between “Natur” and “Geist” and between history and natural science, on which they rest, is as compelling as its proponents appear to believe. The historian's position is based on the distinction between the so-called “nomothetic” and the so-called “idiographic” principles. The choice that the historian makes between the idiographic and the nomothetic approach is not imposed upon him by the nature of his materials. It is a purely voluntary choice.

Much contemporary research on anomalous experiences has been focused on issues of confirming the authenticity of the phenomena, or to determine the underlying processes by which these phenomena may manifest themselves. This research has largely been nomothetic in nature relying mainly on laboratory experiments and/or questionnaire surveys. Yet, traditionally, there exists a third strand of exploration in this field of study–phenomenological research–which in recent times has been somewhat overlooked in this field of work. In an attempt to redress this shortcoming, the authors propose the use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to research anomalous experience. IPA possesses strong theoretical and philosophical underpinnings and a focus on describing and interpreting the process, intricacy and novelty of personal experience. The authors argue therefore that IPA appears ideally suited as a method of qualitative investigation to address important fundamental research questions posed by the study of anomalous experiences. By examining in-depth the experience and meaning of these critical life events, IPA research findings can better furnish psychologists and health care professionals with information to further appreciate and understand their clients’ experiences and to help them with any potential personality transformations or psycho-spiritual crises that may arise after the event.

This paper addresses the epistemological tensions generated due to the search for legitimization of scientific knowledge. It stems from the discussion about science seen through “nomothetic” and “ideographic” standpoints, coming to the conclusion that there is a tendency to theorize from a vision that comes from an organizational order, putting on the back burner, to a large extent, the legitimizer tension that occurs in the socialization of scientific knowledge. The paper also values possibilities to analyze social sciences from Bourdieu’s scientific field concept, who breaks up certain inertias about the official positions that theorize about science.

As early as the 1920s, Mannheim (1980, p. 84) criticized the way natural-scientific psychology had anchored is logic of empirical research. Unlike many others, however, he was able to successfully work out his own theories. His work co-founded a research tradition, which is currently of great interest to the social sciences; psychology, however, has remained largely unaffected. For Mannheim, the essential one-sidedness of nomothetic, natural-scientifically oriented methodology lies in its hypostatizing “one type of knowledge”—i.e., theoretical knowledge, abstracted from existential relations and exclusively geared towards universal validity, as it is—“as knowledge per se” and “one type of concepts—the so-called exact concepts, which have their origin […] in definitions” (Mannheim, 1982, p. 217)—as the only type of concept suitable for scientific endeavour.

After many years in which the ancient notion that a body of law was passed under the kings was regarded as somewhat unreliable, at least in Anglophone scholarship, more attention has been given to this subject of late. However, serious problems remain, and in this paper I will restate some of the reasons why we cannot straightforwardly accept the traditional source account. At the same time, we need to explain where this account came from and how it was produced. My intention therefore in th...

Group psychotherapy is a useful clinical practice for adolescents with mental health issues. Groups typically consist of young people of similar ages but with different personalities, and this results in a complex communication network. The goal of group psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to improve participants' mentalization abilities, facilitating interactions between peers and their therapist in a safe, containing environment. The main aim of this study was to analyze conversation turn-taking between a lead therapist, a co-therapist, and six adolescents over the course of 24 treatment sessions divided into four blocks over 8 months. We employed a mixed-methods design based on systematic observation, which we consider to be a mixed method itself, as the qualitative data collected in the initial observation phase is transformed into quantitative data and subsequently interpreted qualitatively with the aid of clinical vignettes. The observational methodology design was nomothetic, follow-up, and multidimensional. The choice of methodology is justified as we used an ad-hoc observation instrument combining a field format and a category system. Interobserver agreement was analyzed quantitatively by Cohen's kappa using the free QSEQ5 software program. Once we had confirmed the reliability of the data, these were analyzed by polar coordinate analysis, which is a powerful data reduction technique that provides a vector representation of relationships between categories. The results show significant relationships between the therapist and (1) the activation of turn-taking by the participants and the co-therapist and silence and (2) conversation-facilitating interventions and interventions designed to improve mentalization abilities. Detailed analysis of questions demonstrating interest in others showed how the communication changed from radial interactions stemming from the therapist at the beginning of therapy to circular interactions half way through. Repetition was found to be a powerful conversation facilitator. The results also illustrate the role of the therapist, who (1) did not facilitate interventions by all participants equally, (2) encouraged turn-taking from more inhibited members of the group, (3) stimulated conversation from the early stages of therapy, and (4) favored mentalization toward the end. Despite its complexity, polar coordinate analysis produces easy-to-interpret results in the form of vector maps.

The recent proliferation of digital databases of cultural and linguistic data, together with new statistical techniques becoming available has lead to a rise in so-called nomothetic studies [1]–[8]. These seek relationships between demographic variables and cultural traits from large, cross-cultural datasets. The insights from these studies are important for understanding how cultural traits evolve. While these studies are fascinating and are good at generating testable hypotheses, they may underestimate the probability of finding spurious correlations between cultural traits. Here we show that this kind of approach can find links between such unlikely cultural traits as traffic accidents, levels of extra-martial sex, political collectivism and linguistic diversity. This suggests that spurious correlations, due to historical descent, geographic diffusion or increased noise-to-signal ratios in large datasets, are much more likely than some studies admit. We suggest some criteria for the evaluation of nomothetic studies and some practical solutions to the problems. Since some of these studies are receiving media attention without a widespread understanding of the complexities of the issue, there is a risk that poorly controlled studies could affect policy. We hope to contribute towards a general skepticism for correlational studies by demonstrating the ease of finding apparently rigorous correlations between cultural traits. Despite this, we see well-controlled nomothetic studies as useful tools for the development of theories.

This four-volume set has been created to capture and organise 60 years of research and policy discourse on regional integration and regionalism. Since the mid-1980s there has been an explosion of various forms of regionalist projects on a global scale. The widening and deepening of the European Union (EU) is the most pervasive example, but regionalism is also made visible through the revitalization or expansion of many other regional projects around the world. With a strong global focus on the field, this new major work will be of great value to the international academic community, collating and presenting seminal articles written by scholars from around the globe. The volumes are structured chronologically, reflecting the evolution of the subject: Volume One: 1940s-1960s Classical Regional Integration; Volume Two: 1970s-1980s Revisions of Classical Regional Integration; Volume Three: 1990s- The New Regionalism; Volume Four: 2000-2010 Comparative Regionalism.

This paper argues that regional change in Third World settings is inadequately addressed by conventional development frameworks. Instead, research ought to focus on the local articulation of world economic and political conditions, donor nation actions, and policies of Third World governments. Emerging from the discussion is a research strategy that emphasizes the intersection of forces exogenous to locales and local characteristics, draws on detailed knowledge of both, and seeks to provide circumscribed generalizations. This tactic implements a fusion of approaches, blending the nomothetic perspective of development paradigms and the idiographic perspective identified with traditional regional geography.

Public administration, both as a field of theory and an arena of practice, has long borrowed from other professional fields and academic disciplines. Political science, economics, sociology and systems analysis, to name a few, have contributed greatly to an understanding of administrative phenomena. Only limited attention, however, has been devoted to the contributions of the field of psychology, especially as it relates to individual behavior in organizations. The preference of most public administration scholars has been to study the rational, empirical, and nomothetic aspects of administrative life rather than the ideographic and unrational (or irrational). Over the time that public administration has developed as a field of study, most of its paradigms have been rational and positivistic-from scientific management at the turn of the century, to the economy and efficiency movement of the 1920s, to the science of administration in the 1930s, to the behaviorism and systems analysis of the 1950s and 1960s, to the political economy and public choice orientation of the 1970s. Rationality and management theory have gone hand in hand, with little recognition of the role of the irrational or unconscious in the individual and in organization life. Two major exceptions to this trend have appeared, providing grist for the mill of those interested in the psychological aspects of administration. One was the Hawthorne studies and related research in the late 1920s and 1930s which uncovered the influence of morale and emotional factors in work groups and the importance of informal organization. The other was the popularity in the 1960s and early 1970s of a "new" public administration, concerned in part with the roles of individuals and groups in organizational dynamics and influenced by the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. This movement, and the allied focus on Organization Development, however, have been concerned more with group interaction and with healthy and "self-actualized" organizations rather than with the individual psyche. Some 30 years ago, Dwight Waldo, in reviewing the contributions of various social science disciplines to public administration, noted with prescience

A subjective, and necessarily highly selective, survey of the Transactions since 1935 is presented, and ideas in the journal's papers are discussed in relation to eleven themes, many interrelated. One of these is no longer with us, but is discussed under the title: 'The slow British death of mild environmental determinism'. An attempt is made, by a non-physical geographer, to do justice to the enduring important role of physical geography within Britain. Idiographic versus nomothetic stances seem to involve questions of scale, time, and the rise of combinatorial thinking. The ways in which authors have approached problems of perception and quantification are briefly discussed, followed by mention of the new dimensions added by behavioural studies in the last decade. Finally, the recent, and possibly future, debate about alternation or combination between positivism and subjectivity in the discipline is concluded by a quotation from a non-geographer guest of the Institute. The review is illustrated throughout by quotations from the Transactions, necessarily over-brief, but, it is hoped, evidential and evocative rather than misrepresentative through that unavoidable brevity. The conclusion re-stresses the subjective nature of the attempted survey. The very size of the literary field in which to search will always present the geographer with a peculiar sampling problem, such that any 'use' of this source will reflect to a degree the researcher's own bibliographical history. (Pocock, 1981a, pp. 345-6)

The study of the bureaucratic function is an odyssey characterized by gaps between theory and method, on the one hand, descriptive case study and comparative generalization, on the other. Referring to the latter, Keith M. Henderson notes that public administration generally developed from idiographic case studies to analyses at a genuine nomothetic level, with comparison as the basis for generalization.l Theories which explain are built from such generalization. But this movement in the discipline has yet to be accompanied by a shift from gesture to major effort in the study of bureaucracy, especially in Latin America. In part, this hesitance reflects a vigilance against overreaction to the impact of empirical methodology on the study of administration and bureaucracy. The case study has made an important contribution to our knowledge of bureaucracy in Latin America. To undervalue it might create a situation where, as Frank Moreno states, "A dogmatism of method could develop which would preclude the proper appreciation and use of all the knowledge gathered by traditionalist students of Latin politics."2 Regardless of where we stand on the larger controversy between the "ttraditional' and the "behavioral," the intellectual contribution of empirical research is important. It exists in the form of an operational research perspective which says that analysis requires a clear

Any organization is a mass of integrated roles with constant demands and adaptations.l Role behaviour arises from these organizational demands and idiosyncratic needs, the person balancing advantages and disadvantages in given situations, making adaptation to both personality needs and organizational 'press'. Thus, Getzels and Guba have described role behaviour as the outcome of interplay between ideographic and nomothetic dimensions in an institutional setting2; and, in his analysis of organizations, Levinson took a similar position and suggested the concept of 'personal roledefinition' as a link between personality and social structure.3 As Parsons has pointed out, there is an element of'looseness' between personality and role performance.4 This element may be crucial within marginal roles in organizations. What are marginal roles? Stonequist has utilized the term 'marginality' to define roles in an organizational setting which are peripheral to the main functionings of the institution. Such individuals can be alienated.5 They may work very hard but lose direction because their roles are not clearly defined and they are subject to role strain.6 Where there is no clear system of rules which adequately defines the actor's behaviour in the system, and where his role is not central to the goals and function of the organization a marginal role-then he can be subject to type-casiing and role pressures. Wilson has discussed conflict which arises

scientists of all persuasions--"institutionalists," "behavioralists ," and so forth--have tended to ignore or treat lightly various methodological problems confronting the social sciences in general and their own discipline in particular. It is appropriate here to distinguish between methodology and preocedure. Methodology refers to the philosophy of science, to problems associated with the logic of systematic social inquiry; among the problems which are essentially methodological are classification, comparison, concept formation, theory construction, and nomothetic vs. idiographic inquiry. (Various methodological probems are examined by Brodbeck 1968, Hempel 1965, Kaplan 1964, Nagel 1961, and Natanson 1963.) Procedure, in contrast, refers to the application of specific techniques in research. While research techniques inform the day-to-day activity of systematic social inquiry, they are extraneous to the logic of that inquiry (Fleron 1968, p. 316).

I had imagined that the central issue of this symposium would be the contrast between nomothetic, or generalizing, research and idiographic, or particularistic, research in Africa. To what extent are the conclusions of research carried out in Africa limited to a geographic or cultural area: to sub-Saharan Africa, to the Bantu, to the Southeastern Bantu? To what extent are the conclusions generalizable to a certain type of society, no matter where it is found? Such a contrast of approaches would have raised the issues of the culturally distinctive qualities of African cultures and of the unique historical influences upon them. This emphasis is clearly evident in the writing of many anthropologists who have worked in Africa, particularly those with humanistic interests. It stands in contrast to another strategy of research which seeks, not the unique qualities of African cultures, but the general principles, exemplified by African societies as well as by all other societies.

RESEARCH IN the field of children's literature during the three-year period under review was characterized more by famine than by plenitude. Moreover, journals continued to be cluttered with trivia and minutiae. There are exceptions. The Handbook of Research on Teaching included a general summary of the research on teaching literature (Meckel, 1963). Meckel suggested that investigators explore (a) the nature of responses pupils of varying ability might make to specific works; (b) grade levels at which desirable responses are likely to take place; and (c) effective teaching methods, including classroom climate and teacher-pupil relationships. The second-mentioned objective seems redundant except when examined from a different nomothetic point of view. Such an orientation, however, would conflict with the idiographic orientation of Meckel's first suggestion. The significant studies included in this chapter are (a) investigations of both children's reading interests and individualized reading, (b) analyses of children's literature, and (c) research concerned with elementary school libraries. An area of disheartening neglect was that of research into the relationship between literature and psychological process in education.