re: methods/methodology

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 11 2001 - 08:16:01 PDT


All interested in this thread.

Influenced, I guess, by various European traditions, especially the Russians,
I have come to distinguish sharply between the terms method and methodology.
My way of thinking about this seems similar to Ricardo and Alena's. At one
point Alena wrote:

 Then the methodology
would account both for the intimate connection between method and its
assumptions as well as for the connection of a given method to other
methods via those same assumptions.

     I think my phrasing is more or less synonymous. I think of methodology
as the ensemble of methods that mediate between theory and data to support
conclusions relevant to the phenomenon under investigation. This requires
that one think about the (hopefully!) principled relations between methods
as well as their multiple relations to data generated on the one hand
and theoretical assumptions on the other.

     For example, as sketched in *Cultural Psychology*, I am interested in
the dynamic relations between microgenesis, ontogenesis, and cultural-historical
(perhaps activity system?) genesis. Methods used to gather data on these
different scales are not identical but (again hopefully) are principly
related to each other. I never find my achievements adequate to my hopes, but
that seems to be part of the territory, requiring me to keep re-searching.
mike



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Nov 01 2001 - 01:01:40 PST