History Of Q Methodology

09/02/12

History of Q Methodology

The History and Principles of Q Methodology
in Psychology and the Social Sciences
Steven R. Brown
Department of Political Science
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio (USA)

Abstract. Q methodology was innovated by British physicist/psychologist William
Stephenson (1902-1989), but has been applied and has continued to evolve primarily
in the UnitedStates and outside academic psychology, most notably in the fields of
communication and political science, and more recently in the health sciences. The
principles of Q methodology are restated, and contrasts are drawn with the earlier
understandings prevalent in 1930s British psychology, with contemporary illustrative
applications drawn from a variety of disciplines. The conclusion is reachedthat
adherence to an outdated Newtonianism plus concern for psychometric assessment led
British psychology to embrace R methodology and to miss Q's parallels with quantum
theory and its implications for a science of subjectivity, and that postmodern
developments have enabled social scientists, including a new generation of British
psychologists, to reestablish contact with Q methodology and totake advantage of the
leverage which it provides in understanding human behavior.

What has come to be referred to as Q methodology was introduced in a letter to Nature,
written by William Stephenson (1935a), a physicist (Ph.D. 1926, University of Durham) and
psychologist (Ph.D. 1929, University of London), who served as the last assistant to Charles
Spearman, the inventor of factoranalysis. Spearman once referred to his protégé as the most
creative statistician in psychology, but from virtually the moment of its inception, the
broader considerations of Q as a methodology were destined to be controversial and to be
shunned by most of academic psychology. Today, Q methodology is being widely adopted in
the social sciences, but for the most part is little remembered in psychologyitself, save (in
the United States) for the technical procedure of Q sorting. Only recently has there been
evidence that a younger generation of psychologists is rediscovering Q methodology and
becoming acquainted with the vision which William Stephenson promoted for more than a
half century.
Stephenson's most celebrated work was The Study of Behavior: Q-technique and Its
Methodology (1953),and something of the controversy surrounding Q and its originator can
be glimpsed by revisiting some of the reviews which greeted this publication. Charlotte
Banks (1954) of Britain, for instance, while noting "Stephenson's cheerful belligerence," his
"lively and entertaining style," and his "new and original ideas," also implied that some of
his innovations had been preceded by Stern andBurt in particular. Banks may have been
encouraged in this regard by Burt (1955) himself, who also referred to Stern's prior work as a
way to assert his own position contra Stephenson--namely, that "if we confine ourselves to
measurements obtained on a single occasion, we may either average the persons and
correlate the traits, or average the traits and correlate the persons." Thus, for Burt,there was
facstaff.uww.edu/cottlec/QArchive/Bps.htm

1/16

09/02/12

History of Q Methodology

always only a single matrix of data that was at issue, and multiple ways to average across
that matrix. The most stinging criticism perhaps came from Eysenck (1954), who accused
Stephenson of "a somewhat disingenuous tendency to change the meaning of the term Qtechnique over the years, whilstpretending that what he now means by it is what he has
meant by it all along."
In the United States, McNemar (1954) criticized the author of The Study of Behavior for
being obscure and for attacking "such intellects as Godfrey Thomson and Cyril Burt," and
was especially skeptical of the value of single-case studies. In the most thorough critique, to
which Stephenson (1954a) was invited to...