Those memory problems...

A quick note from danah about Elizabeth Loftus's false memory research made me think about survey research and its reliance on self report vs. qualitative research and its relaince on ... well more detailed self-report. In this strange space of social science, of trying to figure out the why's of human behavior as it is related to the what's of our world, we often rely on human memory to provide proof or basis for our theories and models of the world and the human function within it... Yet memory is a slippery thing, unreliable, plastic, unpredictable even to the owners let alone us, the "askers"...