What Sociology Contributes: Psychology, Sociology, and Qualitative Market Research – Part 2

In the first article of this three-part series, I explored how psychology, particularly in its psychoanalytic and popularised forms, has shaped how qualitative market research (QMR) legitimises itself, especially in German-speaking contexts. 

This framing may seem self-evident, but it carries consequences. One of them is the disavowal of sociology. Disavowel means first recognising something and then replacing it with something else, “a fantasy or an action, or something of that sort”[i].

Sociology Is Present, But Misrecognized

Sociology isn’t absent from QMR discourse. It’s present, but often replaced. QMR draws on sociological concepts, methods, and interpretive logics while giving them different disciplinary labels.

This isn’t simply a matter of sloppy referencing. It reflects a systematic reclassification of intellectual frameworks. 

One example appears in a 2023 typology proposed by Rolf Kirchmair in the German journal Planung & Analyse[ii]. He identifies four “psychological” roots of QMR: (1) depth psychology, (2) cognitive psychology, (3) phenomenology, and (4) what he calls contextualism, a category that merges merges two different research traditions - ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism – while obscuring their sociological foundations.

The problem is that this clustering is highly inaccurate. Whereas “depth psycvhology” is part of psychology, “cognitive science” is its own interdisciplinary field although it is very near to psychology.

But then the problems begin: Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition which influenced todays academic sociology and to a much lesser degree todays academic psychology. “Contextualism” is not an established term and purely serves to veil the sociological genus of Symbolic Interactionism and Ethnomethodology.

Both traditions are highly critical of psychologies tendencies to test, label and pathologize. By clustering these traditions as "psychological," Kirchmair fundamentally misrepresents where they come from and what they're actually about. This is the operation of disavowal: sociological traditions are acknowledged at one level, only to be denied and replaced—substituted by a psychological language that masks its source.

Masking sociological references isn't just an academic labeling issue – it changes how we understand the theoretical foundations that guide qualitative research.

Why This Matters

This reclassification has consequences. When sociological paradigms are recoded as psychological ones, their core theoretical innovations are often lost. The emphasis shifts from interaction to introspection. 

By focusing on inner motives and "psycho-logic," researchers risk losing sight of the objective conditions under which meaning is produced. This is where sociological frameworks offer are valuable, especially those that look beyond individual psychology. 

Two Useful Approaches

Instead of asking "What do people really think?" sociology asks different questions. Take two influential approaches. 

Objective hermeneutics (developed by Ullrich Oevermann[iii]) argues that meaning isn't about personal intentions. Rather, there are underlying structural rules that govern how we communicate and act - rules that exist independently of what individuals consciously intend. Oevermann’s method treats all forms of expression (conversations, texts, even paintings) as "texts" that can be analyzed to uncover these objective structures. Instead of asking "What did this person mean to say?", objective hermeneutics asks "What structural rules made this particular way of speaking possible?" 

Discourse analysis (associated with Michel Foucault[iv]) offers a parallel intervention. Rather than seeking hidden motives behind what is said, it analyzes the conditions that make certain statements possible. The discursive field, in this view, is structured by formations—rules that structure what can be said, by whom, and with what authority. These rules do not reflect speaker intention; they constitute positions of enunciation and produce subjects.

Both approaches shift focus away from individual psychology toward the structural conditions that shape meaning. They ask different questions than psychological research typically does: What unwritten rules make certain interpretations seem obvious while others appear impossible? How do social structures influence the way people relate to roles, brands, or expectations? What goes unsaid - not because people are deliberately hiding something, but because it simply cannot be expressed within eg. the hierarchical structure of an interview.

Social structures – like discourses on family success or workplace productivity – don’t just influence what consumers want; they shape what they can even imagine wanting in the first place. Similarly, emerging cultural categories like "sustainability," "self-care," or "authenticity" aren't just reflecting existing consumer values - they're actively organizing how people think about and justify their choices.

These patterns hidden on the surface rarely emerge through introspective methods alone, which tend to reproduce mainstream cultural assumptions rather than questioning them. When researchers only ask "Why do you think that?" they often get answers that stay within familiar vocabulary of culturally legitimate motives.[v]

In the final article, I’ll explore what happens when these tools are missing and how the costs of monocultural framing affect not only theory, but the everyday practice of QMR.

[i] Sandler , J. and Freud , A. 1982b . Discussions in the Hampstead Index on “The ego and the mechanisms of defence”, VIII. Denial in word and act . Bulletin of the Anna Freud Centre , 5 : 175 – 187 .

[ii] Kirchmair, R. (2023). Die Systematik qualitativer Marktforschung. Planung & Analyse, 1, 38–38. https://www.horizont.net/planung-analyse/nachrichten/basiswissen-die-systematik-qualitativer-marktforschung-212073

[iii] Oevermann, U., Allert, T., Konau, E., & Krambeck, J. (1987). Structures of meaning and objective Hermeneutics. In V. Meja, D. Misgeld, & N. Stehr (Eds.), Modern German sociology (pp. 436–447). Columbia University Press.

[iv] Foucault, M. (2002). Archaeology of Knowledge. Psychology Press.

[v] Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive. American Sociological Review, 5(6), 904–913. https://doi.org/10.2307/2084524