ABSTRACT
Q methodology emerged from the same school of psychometrics as factor analysis, but its founder, William Stephenson, viewed it capable of answering radically different questions about the nature of psychology. After its conception in the 1930s, however, it declined in appeal for a while (not being remotely suited to behaviourism!) and has since re-emerged in two separate guises. The technique is the same in both: in the Q-sort, a method which I shall shortly describe; however, there is a distinct difference in the uses it is put to by the British school of Q methodology, who claim it as part of the ‘critical’ approach to psychology, and the North American school, who use Q-sorts as a standard statistical tool and correlate the data with other scales and measures.
