Field research: Problem, tasks, opportunities. Part 1

Abstract

For more than a century, the state of psychology has been characterized as a crisis (crisis of methodology). The present state of the social objects, which serve as the research subjects for us, is characterized by increasing dynamism and variability. The current state, as refl ected in its typical objects and conditions of conducting scientifi c research and practice work by ordinary researchers, often remains out of the attention span of methodologists and historians of science. Changes of the conditions created for conducting scientifi c research and research and practice work in modern institutions require reinterpreting the methods and methodology of the discipline and of the third-level disciplinary methodology. These are conventionally called by us “methods and methodology of fi eld research”. The raised issue is masked and smoothed out by the dominance in Russian psychology of researches based on models of academic groups (schoolchildren, students, seminar listeners, etc.), i.e., by scientifi c research and research and practice works conducted under relatively simple conditions. However, the range of research and practical tasks is much wider; a pronounced shift to studies of mainly academic groups is a shift to “accessibility and comfort” zone and it leads to the erosion of the discipline. Purpose: historical and theoretical analysis of methodological, methodical and organizational aspects of conducting the research in a modern institution. Methods: analysis of scientifi c literature, psychodiagnostics, reflection on the experience of scientifi c research and practical work in modern institutions. It is summarized that: 1) the state of the discipline methodology, understanding of its method, subject and technology of conducting relevant scientifi c research, and explanation of the results obtained are interrelated; 2) with the availability of administrative resources methodological and methodical problems persist and are reproduced even under strictly specifi ed diagnostic conditions; 3) diagnostic issues in the space-time dimension of modern institutions change the unresolved tasks of “methods and methodology of fi eld research” into the status of “raised to the second power problems, “raised to the third power problems”; 4) one of the least developed issues of psychodiagnostics is the issue of the “situation”, which requires its constructive solution.

Keywords

• methodology of the discipline
• methods
• subject
• situation
• field research
• diagnostics
• problems
• issues