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Why counseling psychology needed a new research paradigm

Counseling psychology was dominated by quantitative methods borrowed from natural sciences. This gave the field rigor, but excluded the subjective and contextual — the very dimensions most central to counseling practice.

• Psychology modeled itself after physics, privileging 'objective' measurement
• Quantitative tools measure what can be counted, not what can be understood
• The shift is about expanding the toolkit, not replacing it
• Neither method is superior — both serve different research questions