h measurement procedures as relational coding, which could be called'' soft'' measurement, but I also discussed how what could be considered'' strong'' measures and related quantitative procedures (eg, coding discrete behaviors, conducting experiments) also offer useful ways to concretely specify phenomena of interest-although I argued for reconceptualizing these methods as interpretive procedures and recognizing that they do not exhaustively specify the constructs and processes under investigation. Now, I want to extend my analysis of the ways such'' apparently strong'' measures and procedures can be extremely helpful. To begin with, '' Apparently strong'' procedures can be highly informative about particular situations that are of interest in connection with particular applied problems.
For example, consider Wood's (eg, Wood & Middleton, 1975) paradigm for examining how mothers scaffold their children's attempts to learn how to build a block puzzle, which I referred to in my position paper. That paradigm includes a clearly delineated procedure for identifying the specificity of parental bids at guiding a child. Although the goal is to explore a relational process (ie, do mothers home in and out contingently as a function of the child's moment-to-moment success), the specificity measure does not rely on relational coding. Instead, each bid is coded based on its own properties. Investigating parent-child interaction in this specific situation has been shown to have applied utility. In a study I conducted (Westerman, 1990), assessments of maternal behavior in the context of Wood's paradigm discriminated between mother-preschooler dyads with and without compliance problems. In an experimental study, Strand (2002) found that teaching mothers to home in and out when they show their children how to build Wood's puzzle leads to greater child compliance in a separate context. p>'' Apparently strong'' quantitative methods also can lead to the discovery that specific, concrete forms play a role in many situations, not just the original measurement context. For example, Strand (2002) found that the specificity scale was useful when applied to a task other than Wood's block puzzle. Similarly, we might find that measures which were initially employed in particular structured observation contexts, say a measure of verbal aggression based on decibel levels or, more likely, a measure of activation in a certain part of the brain, identify specific concrete forms that play a particular role quite generally. Merleau-Ponty (1962) used the term'' sediment'' to refer to concrete forms of this sort. Sediment often plays a part in psychological phenomena, and '' Apparently strong'' quantitative procedures can be very helpful because they enable us to learn about these aspects of practical activity.
Two quali...
