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Comparing and Contrasting Essentialist Approaches to Social Psychology with Social Constructionist Approaches to Social Psychology.

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Comparing and Contrasting Essentialist Approaches to Social Psychology with Social Constructionist Approaches to Social Psychology.

A widely recognised definition of social psychology is “an effort to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behaviour of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others” (Allport, 1985). However, how to measure this, the research methods to be used and what constitutes useful evidence has caused much debate in the history of social psychology. This essay will compare and contrast the two epistemologies of essentialist and social constructionist approaches to social psychology and the research methods of quantitative and qualitative used in each approach.
Essentialists’ view of the world is that the properties possessed by a group are universal in that group and do not depend on context. However, a member of a group may possess other characteristics that are not required to include it as a group member but, it must not have characteristics that preclude it from being a member of the group (Burr, 1995). For example, essentialists believe that personality consists of a number of traits and personality of an individual is established by the level of each of these traits. Essentialists also believe that these traits remain more or less stable over time and it is our personality that influences behaviour (Maltby, 2010). As essentialists are able to classify groups as such, they use quantitative research methods of controlling one or more variables to measure the effects or resulting behaviour of another variable and they posit this can be applied to the whole group. However, some psychologists have posited that this natural and individual approach to psychology is not sufficient and a more moral collective approach is required in the form of social constructionism (Hosking & Morley,

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