Research Methodology in Political Psychology

Abstract

Contemporary Political Psychology is an interdisciplinary field where scholars choose a variety of methods from different areas for their purposes. In case of high-rank politicians that are rarely accessible for direct study, the main focus is made on at-a-distance methods. While studying personalities of political leaders, their motives and needs, values and self-assessments one can use metaphor analysis, website analysis, different types of content (D.Winter) and discourse analysis, Millon’s inventory (A.Immelman), or operational coding (A. George, S. Walker). In the studies of public political attitudes, values and images political psychology obtains other types of methods: surveys with open-ended questions, in-depth interviews, projective tests, semantic differential etc. The panel will discuss the issues of relevance of these instruments to objects of the studies, their interconnection with theoretical models and the implementation of these methods to particular cases of political-psychological analysis. The panel will consist of 5 papers and a discussant from different countries. Co-chairs will be Christ’l De Landtsheer (Belgium) and Helen Shestopal (Russia), discussant will be Peter Bull (University of York).