Abstract

The emergence of constructivism as a major epistemology influencing psychology in the past two decades has presented a serious challenge to the dominance of scientism as the prime epistemological base of psychological theory, research, and methodology. The impact and implications for psychologists of both constructivism and scientism is discussed and emphasis is placed on the importance of psychologists' need to understand the tacit assumptions underlying their research and practice. Stephen Pepper's theory proposing four basic world hypotheses is suggested as a useful heuristic framework for exploring these tacit assumptions. This study proposed the development and validation of a self-report scale measuring the four world views of formism, mechanism, organicism, and contextualism as conceptualized by Pepper. Item development and the initial item selection process for the scale used item-scale correlations and Cronbach's alpha. After data collection from a broad sample , principal components factor analysis with orthogonal and oblique rotations was used to determine latent variables, condense items, and identify factor content. Cronbach's alpha was used to determine internal consistency of retained items. Rather than the predicted four world views, two primary world view item clusters emerged from the factor analysis, trailed by two secondary factors. Factor one was defined by contextualist and organicist items, and factor two was defined by mechanist and formist items. The two secondary factors were defined respectively by mechanist and formist items. Alpha reliability coefficients measured.82 for the contextualism-organicism factor, and.75 for the mechanism-formism factor. Since this study sought to develop a scale capable of reliably and validly measuring Pepper's four world views as relatively independent constructs, further convergent and divergent validity testing was abandoned. The author acknowledges that while the two factor solution potentially supports the widely accepted notion of two dichotomous world views, she suggests that this construction may be a first-level organization of world views, and that the efforts to develop world view scales to measure the subtler components of three or more basic world views should not be abandoned. Suggestions for future research include the need for revision of most existing world view measures, the need to incorporate non-Western philosophies into the study of world views, and the construct validation of the two world view instrument suggested by the study results