George E. Vaillant on measuring subjective experience.

"Perhaps the greatest problem faced by the academic sciences is that what is measurable is often irrelevant and what is truly relevant often cannot be measured. Social scientists tend to study what they can measure rather than what really interests them. In this way they sometimes resemble the proverbial drunk who searched for his car keys, not where he had lost them, but under the street lamp where the light was better. In studying defenses my dilemma is how to assess and measure subjective mental processes of which the owner cannot reliably tell us. The usual solution is to employ clinical intuition, but clinical judgment is notoriously unreliable and difficult to measure. Unless I maintain scientific rigor, how am I to avoid superstition and intellectual dishonesty? And yet, as e. e. cummings warns us, "only sonofabitches measure spring with a thermometer." Thus, if I try to measure everything as scientists would wish, how am I not to lose track of humanity? In part the solution lies in a scientific method that permits metaphor but does not exclude experiment and hypothesis testing."

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