Cultivating Q Methodology (eBook)

Introduction:

Dan B. Thomas, James C. Rhoads, Susan E. Ramlo

Professor Steven R. Brown received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Since 1967, he has been teaching at Kent State University, first in the Department of Political Science, until his retirement in 2011, and since then as an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Education. In addition to his teaching, Brown has distinguished himself as a scholar in the fields of political science, political psychology, the policy sciences, literary criticism, evaluation and measurement, experimental design, methodology, and most importantly, Q methodology. It was during his graduate school days that Brown encountered William Stephenson, who innovated Q methodology in 1935. Brown has devoted his professional life to the advancement of Stephenson’s profound ideas, and along the way has made enormous contributions to Q methodology, himself. In fact, since Stephenson’s passing in 1989, Professor Steven R. Brown has emerged as the foremost authority on Q methodology and its amazing utility in studying every facet of the human sciences.

1967 – 1985:
Steven R. Brown—Scholar, Mentor, Friend

When I arrived at Kent State as a graduate student in the Fall of 1969, Steve Brown was beginning his third year as a faculty member in the Department of Political Science. Though he had not yet turned thirty, Professor Brown’s potential as a serious and creative scholar was on full display in a pair of articles that would appear within the year. “Emotional Experiences in Political Groups: The Case of the McCarthy Phenomenon,” was published in the venerable American Political Science Review (APSR). The data for this project were gathered principally by John Ellithorp for his M.A. thesis and consisted of Q-sorts supplied by supporters of Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy in the wake of his failed bid to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for President in 1968. It is noteworthy that the theory serving as the basis for selecting statements in the final Q-sample was Wilford Bion’s psychodynamic account of group emotionality, a process aided by the application of “Fisherian” principles of experimental design as outlined by Brown’s mentor William Stephenson in The Study of Behavior.

“Consistency and the Persistence of Ideology: Some Experimental Results” appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly the same year, and it too bore signature elements of the scholarly craftsmanship that would come to define Brown’s published work in the half-century and some 140 publications that followed. In this case, the target was nothing less than the discipline’s “conventional wisdom” (as distilled by the University of Michigan’s Phillip Converse) regarding the mass-public’s alleged incapacity to navigate the complexities of political life by virtue of ideological principles. Drawing upon Robert Lane’s countervailing view in his Political Ideology, Brown fashioned a Q-sample from the commentaries of the 15 working-class men whose in-depth interviews comprised the data for Lane’s volume. Arguing that Converse had conflated the capacity to articulate ideological convictions with the ability to hold them, Brown had students in a graduate seminar solicit Q-sorts with the same Q-sample at two points in time – with the second administration varied by three lengths of intervals between administrations – from two individuals, one of whom could be designated as “elite” — e.g., Ph.D.’s in political science – while the other could safely be categorized as “mass” – e.g., non-college educated persons with no more than a passing interest in politics. Contrary to Converse, correlations between participants’ Time1 and Time2 Q-sorts were statistically significant independent of elite/mass status; furthermore, these correlations showed no erosion due to the length of time between administrations.

Contributors to this volume who were part of the same graduate-school cohort will need no reminder that the conclusion to the 1969-70 academic year – on May 4, 1970 – was both shockingly abrupt and profoundly tragic. I for one will never forget the surreal sights and sounds of ambulances screaming across the campus to pick up students wounded by shots fired by members of the Ohio National Guard. (Dr. Brown, Hugh Winebrenner and I had been eating lunch in the KSU cafeteria at the time.) Thereafter, classes were canceled, students evacuated, and the University closed until Summer Session. Brown would spend the next academic year as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale as part of the budding politics and psychology program that attracted a veritable “Who’s Who” of young scholars (including John Sullivan, Donald Kinder, and George Marcus, among others) whose work would eventually define a generation’s worth of scholarship in the emerging field of political psychology. While in New Haven, Brown would revisit Bion’s work, becoming trained as a group relations consultant, under the auspices of the A. K. Rice Institute, as a result. In addition, Brown’s scholarly productivity continued apace: he completed several manuscripts based on data gathered on the public reactions to the Kent State event, in the process drawing upon while elaborating Q’s affinities with Egon Brunswik’s notion of stimulus representativeness, and R. D. Laing’s Politics of the Self and Other. In the same vein, Brown would publish the first article in the first issue of the new journal, Experimental Study of Politics, using the opportunity to demonstrate how experimental design principles could be employed in the composition of Q-samples to affect the full-fledged “structuring” of theory. Finally, Brown’s year at Yale allowed him to make the trip into New York City to visit with representatives from Teacher’s College Press putting the finishing touches on the Stephenson festschrift, which he co-edited with Donald Brenner, while presenting his research on reactions to Kent State at a meeting of the American Education Research Association.

Upon his return to Kent State, Brown would enter an even more productive phase of his career. His publications appearing in the nearly two decades prior to the advent of the internet – i.e., before Brown took Q online via the Q-Method listserv – were impressive in number and arguably even more so in quality. Prior to the publication of his majestic, methodologically definitive Political Subjectivity by Yale University Press in 1980, Steve authored or co-authored more than two dozen articles and chapters, breaking new ground on a variety of fronts, ranging from work on intensive analysis (featured in the first article in the first issue of Political Methodology) to the analysis of reader responses to political literature (published as his second APSR article in 1977). Particularly noteworthy with regard to intensive analysis was the piece appearing in Psychiatry (with Larry Baas in 1974) that effectively provided an empirical examination of the notion of transformations, the central but elusive psychodynamic processes symbolized by brackets (}) in Harold Lasswell’s classic developmental formula for Political Man, P = p } d } r, where p represents private motives, d signifies displacement onto the public arena, and r constitutes rationalization in terms of the public interest. The brackets, as noted, are symbols for the ways an individual, typically unconsciously, transforms the energies of the respective domains as she or he acquires a political identity (P).

Lasswell himself, then in his later years but still an associate of the Yale Law School with colleague Myres McDougal, was so impressed with this paper that he was keen to have his proteges schooled in Q-methodology. Brown would answer the call by securing an NSF grant and serving as Principal Investigator for a multi-year project bringing Q to bear in the study of the Lasswellian notion of political climate. In the process, Brown would arrange for meetings between Lasswell and his students with Stephenson himself, thereby uniting physically — if not in immediate intellectual harmony! –the pair of scholarly giants, each of whom served an important mentoring role in Brown’s own career. Eventually, poetic testimony to the deep influence of both men would be seen in the designation of Brown as the recipient of awards bearing the names of each, the Stephenson Award by the International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity [ISSSS], the Lasswell Award by the International Society of Political Psychology [ISPP]. It bears mention in this connection that Brown was also a Founding Member of both ISSSS and ISPP.

Readers unfamiliar with, yet curious about, the full range of professional activities Brown assumed while still in his thirties and forties can consult the reasonably up-to-date version of his (perennially in-progress) bibliography contained in this volume. Doing so would reveal explicit details of a career still clearly embarked on a trajectory of high-energy ascendance. In addition to directing numerous dissertations while serving for several years on the Department’s Graduate Studies Committee, Brown’s reputation as a scholar was undergoing rapid extension well beyond the confines of the Kent State campus. This would be registered in the nine editorial boards of prominent journals on...