Sentences to Ponder (Norman Hoffmann, PhD)

If your theory doesn’t match the folklore, it’s time to adjust your theory.

The first time Norm said this to me I knew I was learning from someone who knew what they were talking about.

Norm told me how, from an academic standpoint and from a research standpoint, the lives of large numbers of people over time really do add up to a huge data sample. And that people groups naturally over time tend to collect knowledge about what works and what doesn’t work. And they tend to preserve that kind of knowledge in the form of culturally important phrases, held in an oral tradition.

He then went on to say how he wishes more researchers would listen to the folklore, and design their studies accordingly – looking for what can be learned by probing what the folklore knows. And finally, if a researcher does some research and then thinks they know the folklore is just flat-out false, they should slow down, listen, and think about adjusting their theory to get in line with the folklore. And doing some research accordingly. Because the folklore is there for a reason.

By the way, Norm’s favorite way of going about figuring out questions for him to do research projects on is, as he would put it, “…from trench to bench…”. Not “…bench to trench….”

He explains that by saying he would rather have clinicians in the trenches tell him what questions they would like researchers to answer. And he much prefers that approach to that of “bench scientists” doing a research project they develop all on their own, and then later telling clinicians why the project is supposed to be important.