Kaye V. Cook

Hermeneutics and Psychology : A Review and Dialectical Model

The authors encourage psychologists to transcend the simple but often made a contrast of quantitative and qualitative epistemologies by reissuing a call to consider a hermeneutical realist perspective. The authors recognize that such calls are not new and have largely gone unheeded in the past, perhaps because of how a more radical hermeneutical perspective has been conceptualized and communicated. Rooted in P. Ricoeurs (1981) philosophy of distanciation, the authors propose a dialectic of understanding and explanation that values both quantitative and qualitative methodologies by (a) tracing the philosophical development of hermeneutics as a paradigm for knowing, (b) demonstrating useful hermeneutical applications to psychology as a whole and to some specific subdisciplines, and (c) illustrating how a hermeneutic realist approach is beneficial to the multicultural study of virtue.

Moral Voices of Women and Men in the Christian Liberal Arts College: Links between views of self and views of God

Views of self (using Gilligans paradigm) and of the Christian God (using a similar, newly-developed paradigm) were explored in 44 first-year and senior Christian college students. Men aligned with a self-ethic of justice; women, more often with justice than predicted. Moral voice thus appears contextually dependent, contrary to Gilligans earlier predictions. Senior students integrated both views of self, but not both views of God, more often than first-year students. This suggests that the Christian liberal arts context nurtures integrated and complex views of the self, but authoritative views of God. All but one student described God as authoritative; most did not see God as relational. This preference for authoritative views of God perhaps shaped the heavy justice self-ethic. Consistent with earlier findings, justice views of the self were generally elicited by impersonal dilemmas; authoritative views of God, in contrast, were equally associated with both impersonal and personal dilemmas.

Christian Views of Self and God: Context Matters

Twenty-four Christian college students and 24 state university students were interviewed using Gilligans moral choice paradigm (Brown et al., 1988). Justice narratives predominated among the Christian college students; among the state university students, care and justice narratives were equally prominent. Eight state university students articulated belief in the Christian God. These state university Christians described themselves less often in justice terms than the Christian college students and more often in terms of both justice and care than the remaining state university students. Further, the state university Christians described God in terms of justice more often than did the Christian college students. The implications of these differences for faith development are explored.

Hermeneutic analysis of virtuous exemplar narratives of Cambodian-American Buddhists and Christians

Virtuous exemplars embody the virtues of a cultural community, a dynamic, contextual understanding that is best explored by critical hermeneutic analysis. In order to describe their lives and refine the mental-health treatment of Cambodian immigrants, 12 virtuous exemplars from a Cambodian-American Buddhist and 12 from a Cambodian-American Christian population were interviewed. Grounded theory and a mixed-methods analysis were used. Rigor-enhancing strategies include triangulation, collaboration, member checking, and researcher reflexivity, as well as interviewing a comparison group of 12 Euro-American Christians. Cambodian-American Buddhists and Christians take their religion seriously, and it influences their daily lives. These Buddhists focus on perseverence in the present life and gaining merit for the next. The Christians focus on serving God and nurturing relationships in this life. They report that they are more different from the Cambodian-American Buddhists than Latent Semantic Analysis indicates, providing evidence of both religious and cultural distinctives among the subgroups.