Our guest blogger, Dr. Sherri B. Lantinga, is an academic consultant, editor, and adjunct professor at Handong Global University. You can also read her delightful blogs about being an expat in Korea here: http://korealantinga.blogspot.com/
I taught the senior
psychology research course at Dordt College for about 15 years. Students
didn’t want to take it, dreaded taking it, and were sure it would be the worst
class in their college career (although History of Psych was a close
contender). They were usually terrified of statistics and/or public
speaking, did not feel the joy of APA style, and really wanted to help people by
doing counseling–not wasting their time and talents with independent variables
and ANOVAs and proper DOI citations.
But I loved teaching
the course. Because I knew something my students didn’t: researching
people is really fun (ok, not 100% of the time, but more than they
expected). And I knew that even if they never again came within 10 blocks
of a p value, they would turn out the best paper and conference
presentation they’d ever done. In fact, our department staked a fancy
steak dinner on it every year.
“Well, that’s nice
for Dordt,” you dear Trinity readers may be thinking. “But WE have to reflect
on Christian Perspective and, really, what does THAT have to do with the size
of t or the insanity program called SPSS?”
Good question–and one
I couldn’t answer myself for many years. But gradually I found at least
two sticking points for Christians doing psych research. The first point
I shall get to indirectly. Imagine that you are in Florida and visiting a
local swamp (just go with me here). Your travel companion wonders aloud:
“I wonder. How many teeth does an alligator have?”* You do not know the
answer. And, lo, there is a dead alligator just yards away! Do you
(a) say “Oh, curious friend, let us adjourn to Disney World and leave behind
your strange nature-y questions!”; (b) open the mouth of said gator to count
the teeth therein; or (c) repeatedly attempt to access Google or your mom or
pastor or anyone wiser than you for the answer?
The method you chose
to answer that question (and many other questions in life) reveals something of
your beliefs about the proper way of finding truth. (Some of you may suspect
we’re nearing the great swamp called epistemology. Fear not.) In the same
way, different academic fields have different preferences for the way they
answer questions like these. By this time you probably know that
psychology is a relatively new discipline (Wilhelm! Wilhelm!) that has
struggled, like a teenager with bad breath, for respect among its academic
peers. Psychology straddled the line between philosophy and biology for a
time, but sometime around Watson and Skinner it opted for scientific, empirical
methods for answering questions and booted out the introspective meanderings of
Wilhelm and Sigmund and others. As a result, neither philosophy nor
biology respect us because they both think we’re using the wrong methods to
learn about human behavior.
Now back to the
alligator’s dental situation. If you chose to count its pointy teeth,
that’s akin to using empirical methods: using your senses to make systematic
observations to gain knowledge about the world. (And, if you had time on your
hands, you could rustle up some other alligators to count their teeth and
consider variables like gender, diet, and dental insurance coverage.)
When you, O Student of Psychology, use empirical methods to study human
behavior, you don’t just trust Plato or the Bible or Urban Dictionary for
answers–you look for yourself (in a systematic and unbiased way, of course).
So where exactly is
the darn “sticking point” this essay is supposed to be about? Here it comes.
God gave us senses and the brainpower to learn about his creation. Very cool,
that. If empirical methods are your only tools for learning about
people, you’d be an empiricist. From a Christian perspective, empiricists
miss big opportunities for learning about people in other ways,
including what God reveals through his Word and his Spirit and the wisdom of
other people. My first-year grad professor at UIC was a dedicated empiricist
who sprinkled even normal conversations with zingers like, “If you can’t
measure it, it doesn’t exist.” But Christians believe in a much larger
universe. Christians believe in unmeasurable things like the twisted
power of sin and the redemptive, unceasing movement of the Holy Spirit. We have
faith in things we cannot see, as the author of Hebrews reminds
us. Empirical methods are very cool God-given tools; but there are other
tools in the bag, too.
Back to our gator one
last time. An empiricist is sort of like someone who counted that
dead gator’s teeth, took its measurements, carefully documented the terrain and
the goo in its stomach, and then concluded that he/she knew everything there
was to know about alligators. But, of course, this gator is dead:
the researcher would have completely missed learning about some of the most
important aspect of gators (like how they whirl around to attack the Gator Boys
of TV fame). The field of psychology pushes empiricism in an
attempt to get respect from the natural sciences. But Christians in
psychology must remember the bigger picture: our senses don’t give the whole
story about people. And thus, from the mouth of a gator, we have one source of
tension for Christians doing psychological research; you’ll have to wait for
the next episode, about snowflakes, to learn about tension #2.
**Thanks to Francis
Bacon for his teeth-in-the-mouth-of-a-horse analogy in the 16th
century.
