A multimethod approach of personal development with students in higher education: contributions from research and intervention

Abstract

After a century of Psychology, it is clear that there is a need for the integration into the study of human development of those approaches that are capable of bringing us closer to the complexity of the processes of change and development. Following some authors on the subject, we can see that it is possible to apply both quantitative and qualitative approaches to Psychology (e.g., Patton, 1990; Mertens, 1998). Our proposal is that different methodologies can be integrated into a research plan, so that a problem is approached from different perspectives. Moreover, we consider that pre-and pos-test measures in the assessment of intervention in personal development (experimental studies) do not go far enough to enable us to understand the complexity of change, and so follow-up studies become crucial. We also believe that an initial exploration of the problem must be carried out and, therefore, exploratory studies (cross studies) are useful since they allow us to obtain an initial outline of the context in which we are going to intervene.  Finally, we defend the fact that it is particularly relevant to go beyond the silence of numbers, introducing to the research plan the extreme cases and the stories that we build together in the movements of human development and change process (study of extreme cases).

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17575/rpsicol.v14i2.511