Disciplinarity and the application of social research response

This response to Corcoran (2010) and Abell and Walton (2010) is organized around four key issues. 1. Disciplinarity: against a focus on the standard disciplinary boundaries of social psychology, and the conventional qualitative/quantitative division, it highlights meta-theoretical, theoretical and empirical disagreement over the object of analysis. 2. Social cognition: doubts about a suggested overlap between the concerns and methods of social cognition and discursive psychology are outlined. 3. Naturalistic data: the virtues of working with records of people living their lives outside of the narrow situations got up by social researchers are reiterated. 4. Application: the applied success of discursive psychological research is illustrated.