ABSTRACT
This chapter, “Understanding Psychology, Differently,” argues that, oddly enough, mainstream psychology’s methods of choice, quantitative methods, are ill suited tools for describing the psychological level of analysis, how persons, alone and together, make sense of the self and world. I argue that to arrive at the psychological level, researchers need to turn to qualitative methods. In particular, narrative psychology is a powerful tool for understanding the connections that persons make interpreting their experiences. Narrative offers the rare opportunity for a more integrated view of human psychology by accounting for multiple influences and levels of analysis, simultaneously, and proposing complex models for the way that persons interpret experience, self, and world. Although the aims of this chapter are theoretical, I make the above points explicit through the examination of a concrete problem, comparing research on the identities of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship from two methodological perspectives. First, I consider the limitations of quantitative research for studying identity. Next, I present a close reading of one of my research interviews as a way of demonstrating how narrative can add to scientific psychology by exploring the interpretations that persons make about their experiences.
