Abstract
The relatively new area of psychosocial studies has developed in part as a critique of psychology and a response to its supposed deficiencies. This chapter reviews the relationship between the psychosocial and the psychological, noting the substantial contributions of psychologists, including social and critical psychologists, to the development of psychosocial studies. Referring to four published examples of research studies, the chapter discusses key psychosocial claims and concepts, considering their distinctive contribution to concerns—social context, subjectivity and emotion—which are also studied by critical and social psychologists.
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Notes
- 1.
Paul Stenner notes (personal communication) that affect is often concerned with accommodating modes of being and reasons for action that are important but might fall short of the conventional definitions of rationality; arguably, affectivity has its own ‘logic’ or version of ‘rationality’, and it is too crass to characterise that as simply ‘irrational’ (as in the classic modernist split between reason and emotion). This is another reason for adopting the term ‘extra-rational’.
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Taylor, S. (2017). Psychosocial Research. In: Gough, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Social Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51018-1_12
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