Dear colleagues,

 

It is with great anticipation that we here are launching this new journal—International Journal of Idiographic Science—through the internet medium. It should bring a long-awaited balance to the realm of our science—restoring the equal legitimacy of the intensive analysis of single-case data to come to the same level of scientific relevance that large samples based research designs have enjoyed in the past half-century.  We hope you will join us in this collective task.

 

Contemporary social sciences are currently undergoing a “silent revolution” in their methodology. Instead of denying the centrality of time, new methodologies—both qualitative and quantitative ones—are being developed that turn the temporal organization of the targets of investigation into the domain where relevant empirical evidence is being obtained.  That evidence is based on single examples of systems of varied complexity—persons, social groups, communities, social classes and institutions in a given country, and countries.  Even though there are similarities between single case phenomena – Peter, Paul and Harry are male representatives of Homo sapiens, Moscow, London, Nairobi and Kathmandu are examples of cities as macro-communities, etc.--  each of these functions in its individual ways, creating its unique history—yet in accordance by some general law of systemic organization of male personality, or of a city.

 

Advancing technology leads us in a similar direction. Soon the computational capabilities will be sufficient to keep on-line records of all measurable aspects of each person. Sensors will be in our clothes, the data are transmitted continuously in time to a file where also all genetic and other information about each person is kept. Then the whole "population" will be on file, and therefore there will be no need anymore for sampling statistics that prove adequacy of the generalization from a sample to a population. What remains is the question of arriving at generalized knowledge from both the fully described population, and from the variability within each member of that population over time.  Only within-subject idiographic analysis techniques are then needed (e.g., time series analysis , temporal profiles, etc.)—as the goal of science is to make sense of the general principles by which these individuals function under so many differing circumstances.

 

 While the methodological tools are being worked out, and the empirically oriented researchers in psychology, anthropology, and sociology carry those to be applied in their fields, the existing peer reviewed journal publication system does not have a journal with an explicit focus on the empirical evidence based on single cases.  This oversight is a result of the research traditions in the social sciences of the past  fifty years emphasizing evidence from large-scale (large sample based) studies.  This dominance of the accumulative (epidemiological) focus is currently beginning to fade away. Scientists and their public recognize increasingly the limitations of inference from large epidemiological studies of crucially relevant social issues—while such studies are costly (e.g., multi-year follow up of 16,000 women in HRT study in the U.S.), conclusions from them are often more than tentative, possible only through betting on probabilistic inference, and – most importantly—the results still do not reveal the mechanisms that make the particular individuals in a large sample function in the ways they do.  The time of belief that large samples solve basic problems of systemic kinds is over.  An empirically thorough analyses of such individual—generic—systems are needed.  As most existing journals do not publish such accounts, IJIS is meant to create a forum for science where basic knowledge is being created through collective collaboration.  In order to make that possible, new journal outlets particularly meant for publication of systemic, single case based data, are needed.

 

We welcome you to our new Journal, and we look forward to working with you!

 

 

Jaan Valsiner    	and	   Peter Molenaar

 

Worcester and Amsterdam, December 1, 2004.