Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 49, Issue 4, Pages 671-687Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.2528
Keywords
European social psychology; epistemological and methodological diversity; 'social' social psychology; history of social psychology
Categories
Funding
- University of Padova [CPDA145940]
- CARIPARO Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The European Journal of Social Psychology (EJSP), as the voice of the European Association of Social Psychology, aims to promote diversity and a distinctively 'European', more 'social', social psychology (SP). However, whether and how these objectives have been accomplished over time remains controversial. This article enters this debate, tracing the history of SP as depicted by EJSP publications, via two types of lexicometric analyses of all abstracts of the Journal (1971-2016). Themes, processes, methods, and their organisation in cycles and clusters over time, were identified and analysed. Regarding diversity, findings indicate that the publications reflect several of the new theoretical proposals that emerged over the years, but do not fully reflect the variety of perspectives and methods of the discipline. It further indicates that lately the 'social' is predominantly present in attention to pressing social issues, albeit the processes involved in them are mostly theorised at an individualistic level. This pattern suggests the importance of keeping open the quest for epistemological and methodological diversity, and of re-problematising what the 'social' in SP means. By contributing to mapping the history of SP, offering a more comprehensive and reflexive view for it, the present analyses also help in forging a stronger discipline.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available