Article ID: CBB385770594

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

unapi

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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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB385770594/

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Authors & Contributors
Kranke, Nina
Jessica Pykett
Kreiss, Daniel
Flis, Ivan
Steven Ruggles
Marcacci, Flavia
Concepts
Data collection; methods
Data analysis
Psychology
Digital humanities
Technology and society
Reasoning in science
Time Periods
19th century
21st century
20th century
20th century, early
Modern
Enlightenment
Places
United States
France
Prussia (Germany)
Germany
Europe
Ireland
Institutions
United States. Census Bureau
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