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Like other neurologists, I was trained to employ local diagnoses and electro-­prognosis, and it still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject matter is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own.  . to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that affliction.  160–161) What Freud called “the fundamental rule” of psychoanalytic therapy was also an original and crucial research tool that yielded a huge body of data.

Many who used such Innovative Practices to Methodology 17 methods often did not report their procedures, and some acknowledged them only partially and apologetically. Methodologists in psychology have focused on quantitative methods in contrast to those in other disciplines, who have credited and featured the qualitative research practices of pioneers in their fields. When qualitative methods began to generate excitement and acceptance in late 20th-­century psychology, much of the groundbreaking qualitative research in psychology was long past, and its methods have remained unstudied.

This advance in Innovative Practices to Methodology 37 psychology was made possible by the interdisciplinary milieu at the University of Chicago, whose anthropologists and sociologists exposed Kohlberg to the rich methodological tradition of qualitative research in those disciplines. Kohlberg forged his procedures from Max Weber’s seminal work on the Protestant work ethic and received help in his qualitative analysis from dissertation committee member Anselm Straus, who later co-­invented the grounded theory method.