Was Churchill a military figure who happened to have gone in for politics or was he a civilian politician with a military background? His role in the early stages of the war as first lord of the admiralty did seem to indicate that he was combining military, naval and political leadership in his own person: taking personal command at the siege of Antwerp, adopting a ‘hands-on’ style at the admiralty and blurring the distinctions between land and sea command. The problem with the Dardanelles campaign was the confusion over whether it was to be a purely naval operation or a joint military–naval one, and the blame for this confusion must lie at least in part with Churchill’s 1914 decision to bring Fisher out of retirement. Churchill’s sacking was a sharp reminder of the ultimate authority of the prime minister, while his service on the Western Front reminded him that his heart really lay in Westminster. Ultimately, he experienced the war from an astonishing range of perspectives while operating as a lone figure. The war provided an important apprenticeship for 1940–5, but it also confirmed that he was essentially a civilian politician who happened to have a strong military side.

Psychology, perhaps more than any other social science, has historically defined itself by the methodologies it employs in generating new knowledge. This chapter surveys the history of methodology in psychology. We begin by first defining the concept of a methodology, then survey early scientific methods of psychology with the work of Gustav Fechner in the 1860s. Fechner, along with other psychophycisists of the time, were of the first to promote a rigorous scientific method in the study and understanding of psychological phenomena. The quest for quantification in psychology would continue with the work of Francis Galton and his monumental discovery of empirical correlation almost thirty years later, which set the stage for a wealth of statistical methodologies that would arise in the early twentieth century. These included the birth of psychometrics and testing, as well as the development of the factor analysis method used by Charles Spearman and others. By the early 1920s, geneticist R. A. Fisher revolutioned the application of quantitative methods by promoting null hypothesis significance testing, while simultaneously packaging experimental design into the method of the analysis of variance. We close the chapter with a survey of Sewall Wright’s method of path analysis, which, along with factor analysis (and the advancement of the computer), set the stage for the birth of structural equation models of the mid-to-late twentieth century. While psychological science has been dominated by quantitative methods, the reemergence of qualitative methods is also noteworthy. We conclude with a comment that psychological methods of the future, to be successful, will likely require a merger of both quantitative and qualitative approaches.