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Psychology is one of the most popular undergraduate majors in American universities, despite the fact that the discipline still has many unsettled questions regarding fundamental philosophical and methodological issues. These issues may be associated with a lack of clarity regarding an accurate conception of science and the nature of the relationship between psychology and science with respect to these controversies. Kuhn (1967) has suggested that scientific paradigms are transmitted in textbooks.

To understand how the scientific status of psychology is depicted, 30 undergraduate textbooks were examined. Textbooks were examined on the following categories:

1. What constitutes science is controversial
2. Bad (Pseudo) science
3. Second demarcation problem
4. Deductive stance
5. Inductive stance
6. Verisimilitude/tentativeness of science
7. Theory ladenness of facts
8. The role of theory in hypothesis formation
9. The role of competing theories (i.e. Laudan)
10. Social constructionism (vs. natural kinds)
11. Rhetorical views of science
12. Science and biases (e.g., political influences)
13. The role of ad hoc hypotheses
14. Evolutionary epistemology
15. Recognition of conceptual problems (i.e. is it important for science to address conceptual problems or only empirical ones?)
16. Kuhnian paradigms
17. Mature vs pre-paradigm sciences
18. Strict method vs "anything goes" (i.e. Feyerabend).

Introductory, cognitive, social, and abnormal textbooks were examined.

This dataset contains a bibliographical dataset of publications in race and education downloaded from Socpus. Each article is classified according to its ontological and axiological positions and its research methods.