Research Methods Quotes

We have entered an era where the kinds of data and analyses that people run have gotten incredibly complicated. So you have researchers using sophisticated software programs that they probably don't understand but are generally accepted and everyone [in the field] uses.

Great scientific contributions have been techniques.

I work like every journalist works so I have recordings, I have notes.

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.

When I research a role it does get a little crazy and maybe even a little stupid.

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument. The native intellectual powers of men in different times are not so much the causes of the different success of their labours, as the peculiar nature of the means and artificial resources in their possession.

The best way to study Mars is with two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist, first at a moon orbiting Mars... and then on the surface.

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

It always cracks me up when program directors or music directors or companies will say, 'Well, we did research, and we interviewed 25 people in our focus group, and this is what they said.' And I'm like, 'I've talked to 25 people in two hours! I talk to 50, 60, 70 people a night! Five or six days a week!'

After years of work in both areas of study, I concluded that the social sciences were different, in many important ways, from the natural sciences, but that the same scientific methods were applicable in both areas, and, indeed, that no very useful work could be done in either area except by scientific methods.

Here's the thing about 'Cabin in the Woods.' I did virtually no research on this movie.

In mathematics we find the primitive source of rationality; and to mathematics must the biologists resort for means to carry out their researches.

As a scholarly discipline, economics has always suffered from physics envy.

Anne Romaine collected her own parallel archive to [Alex] Haley.

In science it is not enough to think of an important problem on which to work. It is also necessary to know the means which could be used to investigate the problem.

Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.

There are other sources of psychological knowledge, which become accessible at the very point where the experimental method fails us.

When I began in 1960, individuality wasn't an accepted thing to look for; it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There's room for intuition.

Gravity is one variable in a lot of scientific processes. If you can remove gravity or minimize its effect, then you can understand the other processes that are going on.

Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.

Astronomers ought to be able to ask fundamental questions without accelerators.

The idea was to study fertilization in as many different phyla and organisms as possible, using the simplest possible equipment and a microscope. Biochemical approaches were not much in vogue, and running gels impossible at first.

Ritual is to the internal sciences what experiment is to the external sciences.