Beyond high and low: Obstacles and opportunities associated with conceptualizing middle power and other middle‐range effects

Abstract

AbstractResearchers disproportionately develop and test research questions aimed at understanding the effects of extreme—compared to intermediate or fluctuating—positions and states. Commonly applied theoretical frameworks and methodological tools reflect and serve to perpetuate this binary focus on extreme effects. Here, I attempt to lay the foundation for researchers to more rigorously and consistently study middle‐range effects in the psychological sciences in general and in the social power literature in particular. In proposing three different conceptualizations of “middle power,”—power fluctuation, power tension, and medium power—I identify theoretical and methodological obstacles and opportunities related to studying middle power. Overall, I argue that the landscape between a construct's poles is neither vacuous nor hypothetical space. Rather, it is potentially fertile, yet largely unharvested, scholarly terrain. Simply put, the middle matters, and deserves greater attention.