Researching and developing conclusions

Last class I was reminded by something Richard Feynman said in his biography. Richard Feynman is a theoretical physicist who was a friend of Einstein and worked with him on the atomic bomb. He was also very critical of some research practices carried out by psychoanalysts of his time.

In his biography “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!“, Feynman says that there’s a fundamental difference between how psychoanalysts develop theories and how someone like Einstein or Oppenheimer develops theories. He says that
psychoanalysts sometimes would come up with the same explanation for two very different scenarios. For example, (I can’t remember the example he gave but it’s similar) he says that psychoanalysts could look at someone who is abusive and say that this is because he wasn’t given much attention or was beaten when he/she was young, but also the could look at another abusive person and attribute that behavior to being given excessive attention and being spoiled children. On the other hand, the scientific method says that for something to be considered true you first have to make a prediction , then run tests to see whether your prediction is true of false, not observe some phenomenon and come up with a “logical” reason for it.

To take this back to our course I have decided that in my ethnography I’ll carry out at least two interviews with each interviewee. The first interview will be the one where I’ll ask questions about my topic of choice and investigate their reasons and “norms and values”. Then before the second interview I would develop my “theory”. In the second interview I would ask questions that I have predicted the answer to based on my theory. If my predictions were true then I would take my theory to also be true