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In reflecting what I have taken away from this course and from my research, what immediately comes to my mind is the question of whether there is a place for anecdotes and instincts/gut feelings in science. I think one of the things that was stressed most in most of the Psychology courses that I took at Bryn Mawr was the importance of being a critical reader of published studies. I remember having huge difficulties with this process when I first started as a student here, and I always had to read articles at least twice - once to understand the content of the article and a second time to find "holes". However, after going through this task numerous times with different professors and TAs, I realized a very easy way to do this. That is, if the author is supporting his/her evidence with an anecdote or a personal feeling in a scientific paper, it was an immediate red flag and worthy of attack. I actually clearly remember feeling one of those little light bulbs appearing in my mind, that I had just realized a new scientific formula for critical analysis: anecdote = unscientific and bad. This is why case studies are not as good as large-scale randomized control studies...

However, this semester I have been thinking more and more about whether there really is no place for anecdotes in science. Some of the most powerful statements that I remember from this seminar are different people's personal stories. In addition, when I actually carried out my research project and worked with my participants, I realized that there were many aspects of the research that could not be captured in a scientific article (or at least in an article that strictly follows the rules of what a scientific article should look like), but nonetheless seemed very important. While I was doing literature searches for my research, I came across some articles written by researchers who are starting to rethink the importance of case studies. Researchers have always been trying to get as many subjects as possible to perform a large-scale study (which is actually extremely difficult in aging research) but now some are starting to think that there might be a lot that we can learn from single-experimental studies and case studies. Of course, one might argue that case studies are quite different from anecdotes, but the point I am trying to make here is that just because sometime is not true for a huge number of people, that doesn’t mean that what we learn from that individual’s experience or perspective is meaningless to science.

One of the things I enjoyed the most about this seminar is that it provided me with opportunities to think about my thesis research in a different light. When we are frantically trying to collect data or reading article after article of past studies, it is so easy to get caught up in the data. I think that the discussion-based format of this seminar really helped me to step back and think about what I am learning from conducting my study at another level. Thank you everyone for all the insightful discussions!