Quantitative Unease

A column dedicated to demystifying psychotherapy research – love it, hate it, or both…at least try to know what it’s all about!

Why Group Analysis and Research are inseparable

“Der Jasager” (“The Yes-sayer”) is the title of one of Brecht’s plays. This person has learnt to accept responsibility for collective ideas and societal behaviour and sacrifices himself. We could say that his tendency to respond with “yes” is masochism in the form of altruistic surrender. What has this to do with quantitative research?

Knowing that some people habitually respond with “yes”, irrespective of the content of the question, is crucial when it comes to questionnaire design and its analysis. Whether these individuals are as masochistic as the “Jasager” is irrelevant for now. All we focus on for the moment is the fact that they say “yes”, “that’s right” or tick “applicable”, even if it isn’t, because they tend to be anxious people, who fear authority, are placatory and conform. And then there are those individuals, who feel insecure in general and therefore opt for the middle ground. Insecure people may not know much about the topic that is being researched but don’t like to admit it. That’s why they tick the box in the middle.

This psychological knowledge is invaluable for quantitative research, because when you’re looking for ‘valid’ (‘true’) answers, you’re interested in what people really think. Don’t get too psychoanalytic and analyse their unconscious motivations for saying “yes” and recommend further 100 hours of psychotherapy. Even if you were inclined to diagnose ‘research envy’ and would like to get these individuals on your couch and cure their envy, resist. Remind yourself that you’re not just a group analyst but also a researcher. So stay at the manifest level for the time being.

With your research hat on, you’re looking for answers, honest answers to research questions. Forget about the social unconscious for a moment and focus on the task on hand: design and analysis of questionnaires. What can you do to be more confident that answers express what the respondents really think without getting them into your therapy group and speculating that these are cases of false selves?

You include ‘control questions’ in your questionnaire. Okay, okay, I admit that it’s ironic using ‘control’ in order to obtain valid answers from already conformist people, but this method can help you identify invalid responses that would give you ‘false’ results.

From a research perspective, ‘control questions’ are important, because they help you control crucial information. They’re easily created. You simply phrase the same question both positively and negatively (e.g. “I do like group analysis”; “I don’t like group analysis”). Obviously, you place these two questions apart. If a person answers “yes” to both questions, you know that you won’t interpret pre-oedipal issues, pairing, or ‘something of the oedipal’ but discard this questionnaire, because it doesn’t give you robust results. Right?

Wait a minute, not so fast. Some researchers may be inclined to leave it there and get on with the statistical analyses without including this questionnaire. But you aren’t one of them. Now is the time that your group analytic thinking comes to the fore. From a group analytic perspective, you know that questionnaires aren’t merely a summative mass of individual items and overall responses. That’s why statistical analysis on its own won’t suffice. Refer those, who may object to this point of view to Elias.

Elias wrote that some people only regard society as the statistical result of psychological factors. We know that this view is reductionist and untrue. The same holds true for overall responses to questionnaire items. It doesn’t suffice to be interested in statistical results only. Just as the “anima collectiva” (the collective psyche of society), expresses something that is more profound than the sum of individuals, the “anima collectiva” of questionnaire items expresses something that is more than the sum of its individual items. Gestalt psychology has taught us this.

Questionnaire answers are both an indispensable tool and evidence of psychological research. So just like society, which has a group mind, a pile of completed questionnaires has its own group mind, which gives us insight into collective attitudes, perceptions and behaviour. To make sense of this ‘questionnaire group mind’, we have to go beyond statistics and the calculation of averages (means), even if this would be statistically speaking appropriate, but factor the “anima collectiva” into our analyses.

So instead of carrying out a ‘mean’ (statistical) analysis, or isolating questionnaire items and considering them out of context, you first examine responses to ‘control questions’ and identify all the “yes-sayers”. Then you look at the ‘middle ground’ responders. After having carefully analysed these and other response inconsistencies, you comment on the ‘invalid’ responses by analysing the questionnaire group mind and the social unconscious in the questionnaire matrix. Of course, you carry out a statistical analysis as well, calculating means. Finally, you comment on all your analytic and statistical results in your discussion section. In combining research with group analysis, you will have more interesting and useful results.

Doesn’t this show that research and group analysis are inseparable? Without group analysis we wouldn’t know about unconscious factors and without research we wouldn’t have the evidence to confirm what we observe. Hence, research and group analysis are two parts of the same coin. Agreeing with this conclusion doesn’t make you a “Jasager”, who masochistically surrenders by the way. Or does it?

Wishing you a good summer.

Susanne Vosmer
s.vosmer@gmail.com