Research in Psychotherapeutic Diagnosis and the Concept of Socio-Empirical Markers

Social sciences in general and psychotherapy in particular have been informed by two fundamentally distinct methodologies of description and explanation: first, causal nomology based on operationalized data, and secondly, empirical hermeneutics focused on the meaningful context of intentions, experiences, and actions. The paper deals with the logical connections between these two modalities of knowledge. We introduce the concept of dynamic interpretation developed by the communication sciences as a tool of intentional description of meaningful situations. We propose the notion of socio-empirical markers as mediator between the two different levels of knowledge. This concept correlates both empirical “hard data” and the sphere of meaningful connections to typical subjective experiences and interpersonal scenes. The concept of socio-empirical markers requires two methodologies for research on psychotherapeutic diagnoses. We need to find markers, e.g., typical answer patterns in questionnaires indicating a d...