- Title
- An evaluation of the impact of the European Association of Social Psychology: a response to Schruijer (2012)
- Creator
- Hewstone, Miles; Liebkind, Karmela; Graf, Sylvie; Petkova, Kristina; Lewicka, Maria; László, János; Voci, Alberto; Contarello, Alberta; Gómez, Ángel; Hantzi, Alexandra; Bilewicz, Michal; Guinote, Ana
- Relation
- History of the Human Sciences Vol. 25, Issue 3, p. 117-126
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0952695111434464
- Publisher
- Sage
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- There is a well-known joke about a tourist in Ireland who, unable to find his location, pulls over and asks a local farmer the way. The farmer studies the map for some time with an increasingly furrowed brow before eventually looking up and saying, ‘Well if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here!’ We feel the same way about Sandra Schruijer’s commendable and fascinating attempt to evaluate the impact of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology: ‘Whatever happened to the “European” in European social psychology? A study of the ambitions in founding the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology’. She has raised important questions in her provocative article; and we are grateful to her for opening up a debate concerning the achievements, and possible shortcomings, of the association, and for grasping the opportunity to interview some of the key players involved in its founding in 1967 (surprisingly only one year after its North American counterpart, the Society for Experimental Social Psychology). In effect, she is attempting, as a social psychologist should, to evaluate a social intervention: what impact(s) did the founding of the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP)1 have? But a good social psychologist, using the methodological tools of his or her discipline, would first begin with appropriate research questions, such as ‘What research design to use for this evaluation?’ and ‘What should the outcome variables be?’ We submit that, notwithstanding the merits of her article, she has of necessity used a limited research design, but has aggravated this decision by failing to consider performance at baseline more critically and by choosing limited, even flawed, outcome measures. On this basis we are led to question the rather negative conclusions of her evaluation.
- Subject
- European Association of Social Psychology; Sandra Schruijer; social psychology
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1356634
- Identifier
- uon:31737
- Identifier
- ISSN:0952-6951
- Language
- eng
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