The contribution of feminist research to the rise of qualitative methods: Soft data instead of hard facts.

Psychology as a science
When I was a psychology undergraduate in the early 1970s, one of the first things I learned was that psychology is a science. Like the natural sciences such as biology and chemistry, psychology was about designing experiments where variables were carefully controlled and measuring their effects. The experiment should be designed so as to control any social or environmental factors that might prevent the researcher from revealing the nature of a psychological phenomenon in its pure form.