Mental styles.

Interesting discussion with Viviane on Thursday. I've been so blessed with mentors all along my path who pop into my life left and right. She's one of them, a new one.

She has a doctorate in psychology - in a very qualitative method from CIIS. I've never been comfortable with qualitative, since so much of it seems very fluffy. Though quantitative methods can be very narrow, they give confirmed results. I've always seen qualitative and quantitative methods as complimentary: with in-depth explorations of fewer subjects, we can form hypotheses linking different mental events/phenomena/behavior and study these more specific things in larger quantitative studies.

Viviane's the opposite of me: uncomfortable with quantitative methods. One point she brought up was that quantitative researchers often ignore how they influence the subjects. Granted, they do so less than qualitative researchers, who interact more with subjects, but they still do so. Being in a lab or knowing one is being tested may influence subjects in all experiments.

One problem with qualitative research - or any research - is finding a balance between precision and nebulousness. I saw this in my twentieth-century philosophy class in the difference between much analytic and continental thinkers. Analytic philosophy seems to worship precision at the expense of overspecialization and debates that seem to be largely irrelevant (or even entire subfields!). Continental philosophers can be so nebulous that you don't know what they're saying (Derrida and Heidegger are good examples).

In psychology, this same debate could be played out between 'hard science' types like cognitive scientists and 'not-so-hard science' types like depth psychologists and transpersonal thinkers. If I end up going into psychology, I'd like to make it a career mission to bring together thinkers and methods from different psychology paradigms that may never speak to each other. An easy example is phenomenology and neuroscience, which can work together to describe experiences.

Don't get me wrong. Highly specialized researchers can do good stuff. But that's not really my cast of mind. And I think people can be trained in different disciplines. Folk like C.P. Snow wrote entire books on this. And what about Aquinas?