Establishing correct concept meanings in psychology: Why should we care and how can we do it?

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to address and to propose answers to three basic questions in psychological science. (a) Why should we care about carefully and rigorously establishing correct meanings for the concepts we employ in our research and clinical work, especially in those cases where foundational concepts such as "behavior," "mental disorder," and "personality" are concerned? (b) How can we move beyond meanings grounded in little more than relatively meager armchair intuition to ones grounded in ways that strongly justify their acceptance as correct and thus might result in consistency and uniformity in the field regarding their meanings? (c) Aside from the standard practices of providing definitions and prototypes, what are some other forms that concept formulation takes in other sciences and could take in psychological science, that is, other means of capturing and demarcating the domains of reference of our concepts? (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).