Phenomenon-driven research and systematic research assembling: Methodological conceptualisations for psychology’s epistemic projects

Abstract

This article contributes to psychology’s epistemic project by proposing a methodology that foregrounds the relation between research methods and subject matter. Considering method-driven and subject-driven approaches as being opposite poles of a continuum, the science of psychology has historically tended toward emphasising one or the other. Method-driven approaches claim legitimacy through an emphasis on a unifying standardised method, while subject-driven approaches insist on human-centred conceptions of psychology’s subject matter. Both poles are accompanied by one-sided methods-to-matter relations which limit the ways in which phenomena can be known in surprising and unforeseen ways. Phenomenon-driven research conceptualises the engagement with methods and matter as mutually intra-acting. Systematic research assembling points to the practical crafting of research activities through ongoing engagement with how phenomena can be known through intra-action. In our time of particularly unsettled, changing, and complex phenomena, psychology’s epistemic projects need methodologies that aim at ways of knowing that can bring out the unexpected.