ABSTRACT
I had ‘deconstruction’ in mind when writing this little chapter for a book on statistics, though that was not the place to go into Der-rida's work, and I made no big deal about it. The role of statistics in psychology is central to the way that researchers in the discipline understand their work as scientists. The reduction of human experience to numbers is taken a step further in statistical representation, and psychology students know well what the mystifying effects of this are when they are subjected to classes which train them to put their ‘data’ through machinery they cannot understand.
In fact, many psychologists who do quantitative research seek advice from an expert in statistics at some point because they themselves do not really understand what happens in the numerical processing of what they like to think of as their ‘findings’. One of the tasks for those of us interested in the social construction of psychological phenomena should be to emphasize the importance of all the debates about interpretation and reflexivity in qualitative research to quantitative research. Tackling the claim of statistics to be ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ is a first step.
So here I deconstruct the dominant opposition between objectivity and subjectivity which makes it seem as if subjectivity is a misleading supplement to real scientific research, and I argue that subjectivity is actually a precondition for any kind of objective standpoint. An ‘objective’ researcher is actually choosing to adopt a particular kind of subjective position, and so if we do not take that subjectivity seriously as our starting point we will never be able to grasp how objectivity is constructed. This reversal of the privilege given to objectivity thus dismantles the opposition, and enables us to rethink subjectivity as a social construction.
