The Problem of Data Analysis in Cultural- Historical Research

The article discusses the main ideas of the cultural-historical theory of social environment as a source of development from the point of view of the possibility of "refocusing research on development" and the transition from descriptive (empirical) ways of analysing experimental data to explanatory ones. In this article, based on Vygotsky's works, it is shown: 1) how the general idea of social environment as a source of development can be further conceptualised with the concepts of "social situation", "social situation of development" and "perezhivanie" and 2) how the analytical model created on this basis can become a concrete tool for analysing the experimental data. The cultural-historical genetic-analytical model developed by the author and experimentally validated is presented as a general framework for analysing experimental data in accordance with the general requirements of the experimental-genetic method. The second part of the paper presents a cultural-historical analytical matrix based on the model, which allows the data to be analysed in terms of revealing internal processes of development. The genetic-analytical model allows the analysis to capture the aspect of universality. A matrix based on this model (and therefore retaining the aspect of universality) can be used to analyse a particular social situation in terms of the specific conditions in which this universality manifests itself.

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