Qualitative Psychology, Vol 11(2), Jun 2024, 197-212; doi:10.1037/qup0000268
A confluence of societal challenges and critiques of dominant modes of psychological science has created an opportunity to reassess how research in the discipline is taught to future generations of researchers. Given this context, psychology instructors must employ approaches and concrete strategies that provide students with research methods and methodologies focused on developing effective and ecologically valid insights about everyday life. In this article, we aim to offer a way to address this need through a review of field social psychology and an argument for incorporating this approach into the teaching of psychology across levels. Field social psychology is a conceptual approach to researching psychological phenomena at multiple levels of analysis with emphasis on people’s everyday sociocultural environments. Based on this framework, it requires an integration of qualitative methods used with a focus on capturing the complexity of psychosocial phenomena in the real world. We discuss what this framework entails and how different qualitative methods are integral to its mission, make an argument for why it should be taught, and how it integrates with an action-teaching orientation focused on giving students’ tools to be active, democratically engaged scientists, and present concrete applications in undergraduate and graduate instruction and mentoring. We argue this integration can promote the development and growth of students as psychologists prepared to engage with society and critical psychosocial questions of the contemporary world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)