Does anecdotal evidence have any type of value in scientific research (in your opinion)?

Yes… in that it gives good suggestions on what to theorize and then test.

Case studies. Hypothesis generation.

It may seem useful, but I don’t think it is. This also depends on certain biases humans have as well. If there was research confirming a bias I had, the anecdote may help solidify my bias. But in things I’m against, I’ll call BS. The perfect example is the famous geneticist Dr. Watson making claims about the intelligence of black people. He used anecdotal evidence to essentially claim black people had more sexual prowess and less intelligence.

@Blackberry It works both ways. Watson hypothesized, using anecdotal evidence, that black people were less intelligent and whatnot. We have clearly tested this and found it to be false. Charles Darwin hypothesized that animals evolved from common ancestors, using anecdotal evidence of similar species across islands in the Pacific… testing has proven this to be true.

In that stage of scientific research, anecdotal evidence can be very helpful.

It’s about the least useful data to go on, but sometimes it’s all you get. Some medical conditions might be so unusual that they may as well count as anecdotes.

And, as others said, anecdotes can lead to new discoveries.

Maybe as the impetus for research, something that sparks curiosity, but as actual supporting evidence for a hypothesis or theory, not a chance in hell.

Yes, but only as motivators for investigation and research.

The scientific method involves observation and deductive reasoning, but part of the cycle is creating new hypotheses, applying inductive reasoning to what’s already known. This is where anecdotal experience may come into play to inspire a new rule (hypothesis). Then new observations must be made to confirm or refute the newly suggested rule, etc. Anecdotal evidence is never (or rarely) taken as sole support for a hypothesis.

Pretty much echoing everything from above, they’re useful to push you in a certain direction, but then you have to use actual research to go any farther.

And as stated above, Case Studies can also be very useful, though they’re a little different then both anecdotes or scientific research. They are very well documented and printed recordings of events, so it’s not “a story about my cousin”, but “a very detailed and immutible* record of my cousin’s state at this time”, and thus far more useful for, say, determining treatments (since they seem from my work to mostly be used in medicine), but they wouldn’t take the place of clinical trials to determine the efficacy of a drug, since they’re only a single data point, and there could be, and probably are, many confounding factors that are unaccounted for. So they’re not quite anecdotes, but there’re also still not useful in the same way solid research is.

*technically they are mutable, but not in the same way that someone’s memory is mutable

No, unless you consider giving inspiration for testable hypotheses that relevant.

@tedd Indeed, thanks for clearing that up. : )

One anecdote has the potential falsify a theory or hypothesis.

Eratosthenes knew that in Syene, in Egypt, the Sun was directly overhead at the summer solstice, while a shadow was cast by the Sun at Alexandria further north.

One anecdote which falsified the flat Earth theory.

@mattbrowne Yeah, but that was tested, after he heard of the anecdote. If you test it, it’s not anecdotal anymore.

Many, but by no means all, folk medicines have been tested and found useful. That is how aspirin was discovered.

@LostInParadise
And again, it was the actual rigorous testing that validated them, not the anecdotal stories preceding the tests.

Yes, but it was the stories that motivated the testing. Anecdotal evidence is not a replacement for rigorous scientific testing, but it is frequently a motivation for it. Hypotheses don’t come out of thin air. Sometimes they are suggested by the results of a previous experiment, but sometimes they result from stories or casual observation.

@LostInParadise which sums up perfectly in my post: it has no weight unless you consider giving inspiration for things to test, which is outside the scientific endeavour.

You start doing science after you decided what you’re going to be testing that day.

There are two ways of looking at science. One way is to see it as a set of immutable facts about the world around us. Humans play no role here. The facts stand on their own.

The other way to view science is to look at the process by which those facts are discovered. The discovery process, though not the final result, is very much a human endeavor. There are no experiments without hypotheses. A hypothesis is usually defined as an “educated guess.” Looking at where those educated guesses come from shows the creative and human aspect of science, again, when focusing on the process rather than the final outcome.

@anybody So if you have enough anecdotal testimony than an untested hypothesis could result from that. With this, then the potential for a new theory could be established, and further investigation would then be warranted.

You said it better than I did.