Applied social psychology, ecological studies of immigrant assimilation, and scientific psychology

Abstract

Despite exhortations to carry out research on significant social problems, Australian psychologists have not responded with enthusiasm. This reluctance arises partly from the problems of combining useful ecological research with scientific psychology. This problem is discussed in relation to the methodological issues involved and the problem of making a clear-cut conceptual analysis of social data. Special attention is paid to the use that can be made of (1) factor analysis in defining the basic dimensions of the data and (2) typologies as a means of ordering the data to enable general principles to be hypothesized and tested. While the need for intuition is readily admitted, progress in ecological studies also demands sophisticated statistical techniques for handling large masses of data. The argument of the paper is illustrated by material from the studies on the assimilation of immigrants at the University of Western Australia.