Conducting Generalizable Research in the Age of the Field Study

Abstract

Over the past 10 years or so, cognitive engineering researchers, especially those working within an ecological orientation, have become increasingly skeptical of any abstractions of task environments made for research purposes. Misidentifying ecological research with field research, I suggest, misses the cental insight underlying ecological theory and method: the need for scientific descriptions and theories of the behavioral, cognitive and social environment on a par with those of internal psychological processes. We realize that for theory of internal cognition to be generalizable, it must be abstract, and we must recognize that the same holds for the need to abstractly model the environment. While ecologically-oriented research should originate in the field, it cannot end there as well, if it hopes to make good on its promise of providing more generalizable accounts of human-machine interaction than the laboratory-bound human factors methods of the 1970s-80s.