Tag Archives: bedwetting

New Issue: History of the Human Sciences

The April 2011 issue of History of the Human Sciences has just been released online. Included in this issue are eight all new articles as well as three book reviews. Among the topics addressed in these articles are the history of qualitative research in the social sciences, character types and space in early statistical writings, a history of bedwetting and its regulation, a history of therapeutic work, Quakerism and the Tavistock Clinic’s development, alienation theory, the work of Hannah Arendt, and the con man origins of Erving Goffman’s (left) dramaturgical self. Full title, authors, and abstracts follow below.

“Toward a social history of qualitative research,” by Gordana Jovanovic. The abstract reads,

There are plausible academic as well as social indicators that qualitative research has become an indispensable part of the methodological repertoire of the social sciences. Relying upon the tenets of the qualitative approach which require a priority of subject matter over method and a necessary socio-historical contextualization, I reconstruct some aspects of a social history that have shaped the quantitative—qualitative dichotomy and the quantitative imperative; these include modern individualism, monological rationality, manufacture operating on the grounds of common human labour, mechanics as the first science, quantification as a technology of distanced objectivity and a search for certainty realized at the expense of qualitative attributes. The so-called renaissance of the qualitative approach starting in 1960s, understood as a kind of a return of repressed qualities, is also socio-culturally contextualized. Both anthropogenetic and sociogenetic reconstructions as well as a microgenetic analysis of the research process demonstrate that choices of subject matter and of methodology are socially and culturally embedded and necessarily linked to broader interests and beliefs. Continue reading New Issue: History of the Human Sciences

Bedwetting & Cold War Social Science in Isis

The June 2010 issue of Isis, the official journal of the History of Science Society, has just been released online. Included in this issue are a number of articles of interest to historians of psychology, many of them featured as part of a Focus section dedicated to New Perspectives on Science and the Cold War.

In the first section of the issue, Deborah Blythe Doroshow explores how classical conditioning principles were used by psychologists in the 1930s to create a bedwetting alarm. The Focus section includes three articles on social science during the Cold War. These tackle the nature of social science during the Cold Ward, mathematical models of rationality that developed during this period, and the science fiction-esque goals of social science. All the articles featured in the Focus section are currently available online for free. Titles, authors, and abstracts follow below.

“An Alarming Solution: Bedwetting, Medicine, and Behavioral Conditioning in Mid-Twentieth-Century America,” By Deborah Blythe Doroshow, Program in the History of Science and Medicine, Yale University. The abstract reads:

This article explores the history of the bedwetting alarm, invented in 1938 by two psychologists to cure enuresis, or bedwetting, using the principles of classical conditioning. Infused with the optimism of behaviorism, the bedwetting alarm unexpectedly proved difficult to implement in practice, bearing a multitude of unanticipated complications that hindered its widespread acceptance. Continue reading Bedwetting & Cold War Social Science in Isis