Psychological evaluation
Modern "Psychological evaluation" has been around for roughly 200 years, with roots that stem as far back as 2200 B.C. It started in China, and many psychologists throughout Europe worked to develop methods of testing into the 1900s. The first tests focused on aptitude. Eventually scientists tried to gauge mental processes in patients with brain damage, then children with special needs.
Discursive psychology
The origins of what is now termed "discursive psychology" can arguably be traced to the late 1980s, and the collaborative research and analysis sessions that took place as part of Loughborough University's then newly formed Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG). A key landmark was the publication of Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell's classic text "Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour" in 1987. Charles Antaki, writing in the "Times Higher Education Supplement", described the impact of this book: Potter and Wetherell have genuinely presented us with a different way of working in social psychology. The book's clarity means that it has the power to influence a lot of people ill-at-ease with traditional social psychology but unimpressed with (or simply bewildered by) other alternatives on offer. It could rescue social psychology from the sterility of the laboratory and its traditional mentalism. The field itself was originally labeled as DP during the early 1990s by Derek Edwards and Potter at Loughborough University. It has since been developed and extended by a number of others, including (but by no means limited to): Charles Antaki, Malcolm Ashmore, Frederick Attenborough, Bethan Benwell, Steve Brown, Carly Butler, Derek Edwards, Alexa Hepburn, Eric Laurier, Hedwig te Molder, Sue Speer, Liz Stokoe, Cristian Tileaga, Sally Wiggins and Sue Wilkinson. Discursive psychology draws on the philosophy of mind of Gilbert Ryle and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, the rhetorical approach of Michael Billig, the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, the conversation analysis of Harvey Sacks and the sociology of scientific knowledge of those like Mike Mulkay, Steve Woolgar and Bruno Latour. The term "discursive psychology" was designed partly to indicate that there was not just a methodological shift at work in this form of analysis, but also, and at the same time, that it involved some fairly radical theoretical rethinking.