Relevance and professional psych in SA Flashcards
There was an intellectual debate regarding the ‘relevance’ of psychology in meeting mental health needs of ordinary SAns in the 1980s. Centred on three main concerns, what were they?
1.The Euro-American bias of the discipline
2. The marginalized experiences of the black majority
3. Concern about inherent conservatism of psychology and it’s indifference to human rights
abuses of the state
The post-apartheid debate about relevance in SA can broadly be said to revolve around 3 things. what are they?
1.The white, middle-class, European/American, ethnocentric and coloniser worldview of the discipline.
2. A lack of broader, systemic, socio-political interventions – it’s still focused on the
individual-level.
3. Ongoing silences around apartheid practices, race, class, gender etc. “and how these relate to issues like poverty, power, inequality and exploitation” (Ahmed & Pillay, 2004: 631)
name and explain the 4 key drivers of the contemporary relevance debate
- Theoretical issues: That psychology still has a Euro-American bias
- Professional issues:
‘Race’: majority registered are still white
Language: majority can only speak English and/or Afrikaans, and don’t cater to the mental health needs of the majority of SAns - Training issues:
-Selection criteria: concerns that they’re biased along cultural, class and racial lines
-Selection panels: also largely white - Research issues:
>SA psychologists and academics display a largely poor uptake of government priorities2% of articles look at HIV/AIDS (SAJP 1999-2003)
>2% of articles are about ‘race’ (SAJP 2007-2012)
>More broadly, there’s a concern about side-lining of socio-economic issues / issues of concern to poor and working-class communities
what does OASSSA stand for
Organisation of Appropriate Social Services inSA (OASSSA).
why is there a lack of progress in terms of relevance of psychology in sa. Name and explain 3 reasons
- Cultural explanations: that SA psychology is culturally “tone-deaf”. No genuine SA
psychology is being taught in universities (with the exception of the uni of KZN). Black
students remain alienated from a discipline with a heavy Euro-American bias. - Institutional practices: up until quite recently, UCT had a prerequisite that required students to have studied maths in high school. But this largely excludes students who didn’t go to ex-Model C, private schools who weren’t given quality education. Those who
are able to get a decent education tend to be white kids. - The profession itself: the thinking is that psychology just is an inherently conservative pursuit. It operates at the level of individual-analysis, so tends to be indifferent towards
social explanations.
it can be argued that this question of relevance is not restricted to SA. where else has there been these relevance debates
- American psychology
- European psychology
- ‘Third World’ psychology
what is the emergence of concerns regarding the relevance of psychology correlated to
political instability
explain the American psychology in crisis debate
-The artifact crisis: Researchers were beginning to pose very troubling questions about the reliability and validity of psychological knowledge that had been produced through the experimental methods.
-Researchers were beginning to identify ‘subject effects’: that participants could
manipulate their responses based on what they thought they were meant to do.
-On the other hand, they were identifying ‘experimenter effects’: experimenters giving
subtle cues about the study, biasing results.
- There was also an ethics crisis e.g. Milgram’s shock experiments. There seemed to be no limits. Participants were being treated unethically in the name of knowledge creation.
- The relevance crisis: Critics argued that experimentalists were more interested in ‘fun-and-games values’: competing with each other to design the cleverest experiment, rather than tackling real-world concerns.
-Social psychology as history: some argued that the kind of knowledge being produced
was historical knowledge, not timeless universal truth. The knowledge would become internalised by society, and changed by it. The knowledge was thus no longer valid.
explain the European psychology in crisis debate
-Student revolution rampaging across Europe. American social psychology was regarded as the enemy, that it had been imported to promote a certain ideology.
Believed that it was not a reliable indicator of social realities in Europe.
- Also concerned about the lack of theory in European social psychology – it seemed to allbe about method.
-Thus, psychology was plunged into a state of crisis amid political tumult on both sides of the Atlantic
explain the third world psychology in crisis debate
.e. Africa, India, Philippines, Latin America, Middle East etc.
- Euro-American psychology roundly criticised to be invalid and not speaking to on-the-ground relaties
“…concerned intellectuals have been arguing since the late 1970s that psychological theories remain beholden to American and European (especially Germanic) explanations of human functioning (Holdstock, 1981a; Turton, 1986) and that the paradigmatic
inclinations of psychology are in keeping with “the worldview of the colonizer” (Ahmed & Pillay, 2004).” (Long, 2012)
- But they didn’t really move beyond critique. Didn’t come up with any credible alternative to Euro-American psychology.
The 60s and 70s were thus an age of relevance. Relevance became the animating question across the world of psychology
name 2 earlier debates about relevance
The debate about relevance can be traced back further than the 1960s:
● 1936: The founding of society of psychological study of social issues (SPSSI) as a form
of protest against perceived indifference of mainstream psychology towards social
issues.
● 1920s: a fallout between two leading psychologists, Boring and Terman –
experimentalism versus applied psychology (in the ‘real world’).
● 1911: ‘The crisis of experimental psychology’ (Kostyleff).
● 1899: ‘The crisis in psychology’ (Willy).
It is difficult to pinpoint when an intellectual trend takes root. But we can conclude with some degree of confidence that concerns about the relevance of psychology have been around as long as the discipline has been around.
why is this question of “relevance” so persistent?
> Immediate problem has to do with the subject matter of the discipline
- There’s been a failure to define it, which is highly unusual for a discipline. Psychology
has failed to settle on it’s fundamental questions and “stock” methods of investigation.
- It’s boundaries are largely undefined. If the subject matter is disagreed upon, there will
always be an argument about what ‘relevant’ psychology is. It’s almost inevitable that psychologists will be accused of irrelevance.
> There remains a significant degree of indecision about psychology’s cognitive interest.
-The sciences can be categorized as empirical, interpretive, or emancipatory/critical. The
knowledge defined in each type of science entails clear cognitive interests. E.g.
empirical try to predict and control; interpretive aims to understand phenomenon; critical is concerned with human liberation.
- In other words, knowledge always has an angle/aim, it’s never neutral.
- But what is psychology’s cognitive interest? All three. Psychologists do different things
with the knowledge they produce, so once again there is a disagreement.
- Because of psychology’s ambiguous disciplinary structure and lack of unifying cognitive discipline, the different “camps” can accuse one another of irrelevance
> The culture of scientism within the field of psychology: the glorification of quantitative forms of research.
- Psychology has been accused of being “a cult of numbers”.
- Since its beginnings, Psychology has been battling to establish its scientific credentials.
Quantitative study has been seen as the way to accomplish that.
- But the obsessions with observation and measurement has restricted psychology to the confines of the experimental laboratory.
- So mainstream psychological knowledge cannot be extrapolated to the outside world, which has uncontrolled variables and unpredictability. There are thus issues surrounding ecological validity
> A consequent difficulty theorizing rapid social change, which has accelerated over recent decades.
- Psychology’s reliance on the scientific method and the laboratory hinders it from fully understanding such change in the real world. It cannot “hold its own” in the real world.
> Different conceptions of ‘relevance’: When we speak about ‘relevant’ we’re not just talking aboutan adjective. Relevance is a concept, of which people simply have different understandings.
what are the 3 types of relevance
1: Social relevance: the expectation that the discipline must contribute to human welfare.
2: Cultural relevance: that it must be Afrocentric and accessible to the majority of SAns.
3: Market relevance: the knowledge produced must be internationally benchmarked
what does PsySSA stand for
the Representative body of Psychologists in SA
define relevance
> relevance’ refers to the benefits psychology is thought to offer society.
Underlying the talk of ‘relevance’ is the notion of the ‘public good’.
So when discussing relevance, we need to ask “relevant to whom”?
