Developing a qualitative research culture in university psychology departments

We are academics in the Department of Psychology, Middlesex University. Nollaig’s research is primarily qualitative and Richard’s primarily quantitative. We form part of a team responsible for developing and delivering Research Methods modules to students at undergraduate and postgraduate level. In this paper, we draw on our experiences and those of colleagues to discuss some challenges (and possible solutions) to changing the research culture in a psychology department

Personality characteristics associated with susceptibility to false memories

Accepted ManuscriptThis study examined whether certain personality characteristics are associated with susceptibility to false memories. Participants first answered questions from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in order to measure various personality characteristics. They then watched a video excerpt, the simulated eyewitness event. They were next encouraged to lie about the videotaped event during an interview. A week later, some participants recognized confabulated events as being from the video. Two personality characteristics in particular—the introversion-extroversion and thinking—feeling dimensions—were associated with susceptibility to false memories.Frost, P., Sparrow, S. & Barry, J. (2006). Personality Characteristics Associated with Susceptibility to False Memories. The American Journal of Psychology, 119(2), 193-204. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2044533

Safety Case Workshop

In January 2013, a two-day Safety Case Workshop was conducted in Huntsville, Alabama under the sponsorship of the SAE International G-48 System Safety Committee and A-P-T Research, Inc. (APT). Attendees from industry, government and academia participated, with several making formal presentations on various safety methods. Industry focus is turning to international pursuits, which involve a broader understanding of different approaches to ensuring safety. The United States has typically used a process-based approach in managing system safety programs, but there is a current movement to use the evidence-based Safety Case approach to validate the safety of systems. At the conclusion of the workshop, participants reached the consensus view that the Safety Case approach merits being accepted among the best world-wide system safety practices

Materials and Devices of the Public: An Introduction

This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centered approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four articles that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucaldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement - perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects - we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the articles in this special section, namely their focus on 1) mundane technologies, 2) experimental devices and settings for material participation; 3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and 4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics

Why political ontology must be experimentalized, On ecoshowhomes as devices of participation

This paper contributes to debates about the ontological turn and its implications for democracy by proposing an experimental understanding of political ontology. It discusses why the shift from epistemology to ontology in STS has proved inconclusive for the study of politics and democracy: the politics of non-humans has been assumed to operate on a different level from that of politics and democracy understood as institutional and public forms. I distinguish between three different understandings of political ontology: theoretical, empirical and experimental. Each of these implies a different approach to the problem that non-humans pose for democracy. Theoretical ontology proposes to solve it by conceptual means, while empirical ontology renders it manageable by assuming a problematic analytic separation between constituting and constituted ontology. This paper makes the case for the third approach, experimental ontology, by analysing an empirical site, that of the ecoshowhome. In this setting, material entities are deliberately invested with moral and political capacities. As such, ecoshowhomes help to clarify two main features of experimental political ontology: 1) ontological work is here not so much relocated from theory to empirical practice, but distributed among actors and entities involved in them, and 2) normative variability does not just pertain to the enactment of things, but can be conceived of as internal to political objects. From these two features of experimental ontology something follows for democracy as an ontological problem. This problem does not dissolve in empirical settings, but these settings make possible its articulation by experimental means

From problems in the North to the problematic North : Northern devolution through the lens of history

Current debates about Northern English cities and their role in national economic strategies cannot be read simply through the lens of contemporary politics. We therefore take the Northern Powerhouse as our starting point in a chapter which traces a long history of policy and planning discourses about the North of England. We use David Russell’s chronology of key historical moments in which Northern English cities hold a particular charge in cultural narratives of the nation to guide our analysis of contemporaneous tensions in debates about planning and governance. A focus on representations about the North of England over the course of the last two centuries reveals four interlocking themes: namely the role of London in directing debates about the North; a tension between political and spatial approaches to planning; the characterisation of cities in the North of England as intrinsically problematic places; and the continued issue of poverty in these cities