Toward The Human Science Psychology

It was only after humanistic psychology has flourished for two decades that humanistic psychologists found that humanistic psychology did not shake the scientific ideas and research methods of mainstream psychology at all, though it has had a tremendous impact on the culture and value of western society. On account of this , humanistic psychologists of new generation have proposed a number of research approaches to develop psychological methodology in accordance with human nature and to construct a complete image of man. These approaches have reflected the effort of humanistic psychologists to make psychology a humanistic science and to put humanistic methodology into concrete practice of humanistic research instead of being merely theories.In its development and formation, humanistic psychological research approaches have drawn humanism from western traditional culture and been instructed both in theory and practice by the humanistic spirits which is passed on in psychological history. The crisis that humanistic psychology has experienced in its development is a direct motivity in its formation. Humanistic psychological research approaches stick to the approaches of humanistic science, the scientific nature with problem-centered idea , intuitionism , the research routes of macrocosmism , the research paradigm of subjectivism, and non-deterministic psychological explanatory frame.Phenomenological research approach put the basic concepts, principles and methods of Husserl phenomenology into the theory and practice of psychology. The research objective of phenomenology is to acquire an understanding of phenomena itself and of the experiential meaning in human life through the analysis of experience described by research participants. It includes acquiring descriptive data from interview,reading the data completely to set up meaning units, transferring the meaning units into psychological expressions to get individual psychological descriptions,and finally expressing the final results again.Heuristic research aims to find the important potential meaning in human experience.It derives descriptions of experiential structures in human life from introspective inquiry and interview,and reveals the power of internal tacit knowledge to present the deepest meaning stream and knowledge stream in consciousness through the constant,intense and passionate attention of researchers to the concerned issue and with resort to the perception,understanding,belief and judgement of men.It includes six basic research processes:initial engagement,immerse,incubation, illumination,explication,and creative synthesis.Hermeneutic research regards human experience and behavior as text to be interpreted.It emphasizes the complex relation of experience to its background and environment,tries to seek understanding between obviously different or even opposite meaning systems,and holds that experience can only be understood after its background is understood.Its task is to disclose the meaning of text in order to get a deeper understanding of human psychology and behavior.Experience research put weights on elucidation of experiential factors,which are necessary and valid conditions for the formation of an experience.The research objective is to elucidate the basic structure of experience in order that the experiencer can deal with all kinds of experiences in life better.In experience research,all participants are researchers.In qualitative research stage,it includes four basic processes: researchers sharing their individual understanding of experiential structure with each other;expressing their agreement or disagreement as well as reasons;resolving disputes and turning back to description of experience if needed;arriving at a common knowledge of experiential structure under research.Based on the results of qualitative research, hypotheses are formed and testified with traditional research methods.Dialogue research,deeply influenced by dialogue philosophy, stresses the decisive role of dialogue in research process.It maintains that research is not a testifying process according to a give procedure but a"discovering"process with the opening out of dialogue.It utilizes team research as the measure to explore data.Dialogues between team members,including their interaction toward data,are the source to the acquisition of meaning from data.The value of dialogue is emphasized in the analysis of data and conditions for real dialogues are examined.Phenomenography was formed in the practice of education research. For phenomenography researchers,people always experience phenomena in a few basic ways no matter what it is.As a result, phenomenography takes human descriptions of phenomena as research objects and tries to find distinctive concepts or experiential modes formed by people when experiencing phenomena and their relations.Humanistic psychological research approaches,on the one hand, inherit some basic features from traditional humanistic psychological methodology:such as,giving prominence to human being and the difference of human psychology and behavior with those of objects; bringing into the scope of psychology human features like individuality, purposiveness,valuableness,social historical quality and integrity which are abandoned by scientism methodology;and aiming to explore research views,methods and measures suitable for human psychological characteristics.All these make up for defects in scientism psychological methodology.On the other hand,they not only pursue the reality of real life,but pay attention to the goodness and beauty in human life.They encourage people to have the most direct contact with what are happening,i.e,what we are thinking,perceiving,and experiencing, disclose their meaning and value,and unfold ourselves and our life world which are not in our consciousness.All these make them integrated into concrete practice and acquire some beneficial research results instead of being merely abstract theory,which are undoubtedly perfection on humanistic psychological methodology.But we can see that while paying attention to the subjectivity of human being and emphasizing researches on human internal experiences, humanistic psychological research approaches deny the value and significance of scientism psychological methodology,and fail to pay attention to the practical nature of human being.Obviously,just like scientism psychology,they ignore the integrated nature of human being and fall into the bipartite view of metaphysics in thinking manner.To construct a whole and complete image of man,psychology must establish a new research paradigm that is corresponding to man's unique characteristics,i.e.an integrated viewpoint of human nature. Considering psychology's future from this theoretical background,we can predict that the true psychology's future must be one that sees human nature from a practical point of view and thus wholly displays all the unique characteristics that make human beings as they are,must be thoroughly scientism and humanistic,must be based on the grasp of the integrated nature of human being.