The Mismatch between Current Research Methods and the Nature of Psychological Phenomena What Researchers Must Learn from Practitioners

Psychological research and practice both start from what we all know about being human because we are human, what we know about each other because we participate in shared meaning systems (language and culture), and what we know about unique individuals. Practitioners rely on these three sources of knowledge, but researchers try to establish a fourth kind by looking for a limited number of general and empirically based regularities. However, this project runs aground because of four characteristics of personal processes: they are influenced by an indefinitely high number of factors; they are sensitive to outcomes and, hence, always changeable; the regularities that can be found stem from participation in shared meaning systems already implicitly familiar; and they are unique. These characteristics are circumvented in the popular randomized controlled trial research design, but at the expense of practical relevance of the findings.