Beyond Traditional Paradigms: A Bibliometric and Systematic Content Analysis of Quantitative and Qualitative Methodological Innovations in Organisational Psychology

Dickson Mdhlalose

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Organisational psychology now has a serious problem with how it conducts research. The standard tools questionnaires at a single point in time, typical regression analysis, and looking at a few organisations as examples do not really fit the way organisations are now: they are always changing, have many levels, and rely heavily on digital technology. So, this research used a large-scale quantitative analysis of published papers (14,617 in total) from Web of Science, Scopus, and PsycINFO, along with a careful, systematic review of their content, to examine how research methods in organisational psychology are changing. It didn't involve asking people directly; instead, the researchers measured how often methods are being used by looking at what's being published, how often those publications are quoted by others, and which keywords are used together. They did this using VOSviewer 1.6.20 and the bibliometrix 4.2.1 package in R. The findings show a 79.8% increase in publications using more sophisticated math-based methods, a 229% increase in studies using digital ethnography (a kind of internet-based observation of groups), and a 296% increase in the use of natural language processing to make sense of information from organisations. Importantly, research that combined different methods (both numbers and words) got considerably more citations (an average of 47.3 per paper) than research which was purely about numbers (31.6) or purely about words (19.4). The paper contends that simply adopting a new method without carefully considering its assumptions about how things work, any ethical concerns, and the specifics of the organisation being studied means we're following methodological trends rather than making scientific progress. To help researchers, they introduce a new Methodological Fit Matrix to help them choose a method that works with their research question, their fundamental beliefs about reality and what can be known, and what's important to people involved.

Keywords: Methodological innovation; Mixed-methods integration; Bibliometric analysis; Epistemological fit; Digital ethnography. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B41 C80 C90 D91 M12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esprep:341045

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