Teaching Research Methodology: Implications for Psychology on the Road Ahead

This article examines the ways in which academics who teach undergraduate research methodology courses conceptualise research and scholarship and the role these aspects play in the way they construct their courses. In-depth interviews were conducted with nine academics who have been intimately involved in constructing social science research courses at South African universities. Carspecken's (1996) critical hermeneutic method was adapted and applied to the interview material. Four beliefs held by participants on how and why their course curricula came into being are presented. The first and second beliefs relate to the position of some of the participant academics as expert researchers and also expert teachers of research. The third belief is that the construction of curricula is affected by what has traditionally been taught to students about research, but also by severe criticisms of historical content. Political repositioning in South Africa is the fourth belief held by participants about what has shaped research courses. Academics in psychology need to take cognisance of the fact that methodological debates in the social sciences and current thinking about knowledge and learning are pointing to new directions in how we should train students to study the human realm. If we want to remain relevant to the social world in which we live, we need to discuss these directions and forge a new way of acting in this world.

Race and Relevance: A Content Analysis of the South African Journal of Psychology

All 478 papers which were published in the South African Journal of Psychology between 1970 and 1995 were content analysed to determine changing ways in which race issues have been dealt with in the Journal.1 It is argued that the discipline of psychology may have played a role in perpetuating racism under the apartheid regime by inaction, by not speaking out. To capture this distinction between ‘speaking out’ and ‘not speaking out’ we distinguished between papers which consider race issues in a value-neutral scientific manner and those which consider race issues in a critical, politicised manner. The results show that the lowest proportion of papers dealing with race occur during the early 1980s, and that in contrast to the mostly ‘scientific’ considerations of race in the 1970s, from the late 1980s there has been a steady increase in ‘political’ papers. These categories of race were also related to the type of methodology which the papers employed, and the field of psychology which was being investigated. The results suggest that the content of the Journal articles has not been independent of ideological forces in South African psychology. We conclude by discussing some of the warrants which may have justified the psychological practices in this country which ignored the profound psychological effects of racism and apartheid.

Crash

This article introduces the special edition. I characterize the edition as representing an intersection between the historical trajectories described by the South African Journal of Psychology and the ongoing series of Qualitative Methods Conferences hosted by local psychology departments. With reference to the rhetoric used to introduce previous special editions of the SAJP, the papers presented at the first and second Qualitative Methods Conferences, and the articles included in this edition, I suggest that the SAJP may be en route from a technicist understanding of knowledge accumulation to a more politically aware, contextual view, while the Qualitative Methods Conferences may be in the process of increasing academic co-optation.