Steven R. Brown, Professor Emeritus, Evaluation and Measurement, presented “Subjectivity in the Social Sciences” at the 13th International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences in Granada, Spain, on July 27, 2018.
Summary: Subjectivity is ubiquitous and implies perspectives that range in scope from the intrapersonal (as in individual musings and daydreams) to the intercultural (as in communication between and among identities) and in sophistication from the inchoate babblings of infants to the theoretical pronouncements of philosophers and mathematicians. Q methodology is a philosophical and conceptual framework that, in tandem with its technical and analytical procedures, provides the basis for a science of subjectivity that is applicable across all humanities and sciences as well as their ex-tensions into public policy, and that has implications for all presentations in annual meetings of the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences. This paper presents the basic principles and procedures of Q methodology (rooted in the fundamentals of factor-analytic developments of the past century) and demonstrates its applicability to a variety of subject-matter domains, including literary interpretation, strategic planning and decision making, scientific creativity, program evaluation, and the intensive analysis of single cases.