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Article ID: CBB385770594

Thinking in Multitudes: Questionnaires and Composite Cases in Early American Psychology (2020)

Young, Jacy L. (Author)

History of the Human Sciences
Volume: 33
Issue: 3-4
Pages: 160-174

DOI: 10.1177/0952695120903909

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695120903909

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Data collection Data analysis Reasoning in science Case studies Psychology Questionnaires 19th century United States

In the late 19th century, the questionnaire was one means of taking the case study into the multitudes. This article engages with Forrester’s idea of thinking in cases as a means of interrogating questionnaire-based research in early American psychology. Questionnaire research was explicitly framed by psychologists as a practice involving both natural historical and statistical forms of scientific reasoning. At the same time, questionnaire projects failed to successfully enact the latter aspiration in terms of synthesizing masses of collected data into a coherent whole. Difficulties in managing the scores of descriptive information questionnaires generated ensured the continuing presence of individuals in the results of this research, as the individual case was excerpted and discussed alongside a cast of others. As a consequence, questionnaire research embodied an amalgam of case, natural historical, and statistical thinking. Ultimately, large-scale data collection undertaken with questionnaires failed in its aim to construct composite exemplars or ‘types’ of particular kinds of individuals; to produce the singular from the multitudes.

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Article Chris Millard; Felicity Callard (2020) Thinking in, with, across, and beyond cases with John Forrester. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-14). unapi

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