Psychological Generalization

Within-Case Psychological Generalization

A psychological approach to within-case generalization was first articulated by the German historian Wilhelm Dilthey during the advent of the social sciences in the mid 1800s. Dilthey argued that the social sciences required a different methodology than the physical sciences because social scientists studied worlds of meaning that had been constructed by human beings.

Thus, according to Dilthey, the goal of social science is to understand the different meanings that both were created by and, in turn, influenced people and shaped events in different historical eras. Dilthey argued that researchers could do this by engaging in a hermeneutical process, that is, a circular approach to inquiry in which generalities were inferred by looking at particulars (e.g., cultural artifacts such a historical period's legal code or popular works of art) and in which inferred generalities, in turn, permitted social scientists to see particulars in new and richer ways. These enhanced perceptions of particulars added additional depth and dimension to general statements about a historical era or a particular culture, and these new general insights, in turn, shed additional light on the meaning of particulars.

Dilthey argued that social sciences could do all of the above because they were human beings studying other human beings. Because of this shared humanity, social scientists could understand social phenomena psychologically. Unlike scientists who studied physical phenomena, social scientists could use their own life experiences, along with their imaginations, to make sense of other historical eras and the general meaning implicit in the artifacts these eras produced.

Most contemporary qualitative researchers accept some variation of Dilthey's view of how within-case generalizations are generated. They have, however, also developed a range of strategies—for example, triangulation, member checking, peer debriefing, audits—to reassure skeptics that their psychologically generated within-case generalizations are not merely figments of researchers' imaginations.

Generalizability in Psychological Terms

Contemporary researchers also have used variations of the psychological generalization notion to redefine generalizability in psychological terms. Robert Stake, for example, has written about naturalistic generalization, and Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba have articulated the notion of transferability. Both notions rely on the research consumer's psychological judgment.

In addition, Robert Donmoyer used schema theory to reconceptualize generalizability in psychological terms and, in the process, to answer a long-standing question about the utility of studying atypical cases. He argued that outlier cases can be useful because such cases require consumers of the research to not only assimilate the details of a case into their existing cognitive structures, but also to expand their existing structures to accommodate the idiosyncratic elements of the case. This accommodation process leads to cognitive structures that are both more integrated and more differentiated than they were before the accommodation occurred; such structures, in turn, should produce more sophisticated perceptions and action.