might have suggested it to me. I never can remember.
The legal system in the UK is based on a theory that is fundamental to
it's premise of justice: the adversarial system. Two lawyers fight it
out and the judge makes the decision based on two aggressive and
deliberately skewed or biased perspectives.
In research it's often the blindness (single, double or triple blind
trials) that is used as an indicator of quality of the result. The
reason is that bias is a problem and increasing blindess to knowledge of
the study content ensures more accurate results. Triple blind means even
the statistician doesn't know what the figures they are looking at
represents. Bias is the bane of positivistic research methodology but
accepted by qualitative researchers as a necessary evil and sometimes
even used.
What if it could be different?
Imagine the adversarial research methodology used for reviews, data
analysis and the sort of stuff that goes on in commissioning. Two
researchers go out, one biased to prove the hypothesis and one biased
against it. The genius and the critic as it were. Each has the objective
to prove their argument and is charged with doing it with the tenacity
of fanatics. They present their case but both have access to the same
information.
What I'm stuck on is the judge. Given two diametrically opposed
arguments based on the same data these research judges have to make a
decision. What are they like and what's their process?
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