Questionnaire Quotes (3 quotes)
No aphorism is more frequently repeated in connection with field trials, than that we must ask Nature few questions, or, ideally, one question, at a time. The writer is convinced that this view is wholly mistaken. Nature, he suggests, will best respond to a logical and carefully thought out questionnaire; indeed, if we ask her a single question, she will often refuse to answer until some other topic has been discussed.
'The Arrangement of Field Experiments', The Journal of the Ministry of Agriculture, 1926, 33, 511.
Random search for data on ... off-chance is hardly scientific. A questionnaire on 'Intellectual Immoralities' was circulated by a well-known institution. 'Intellectual Immorality No. 4' read: 'Generalizing beyond one's data'. [Wilder Dwight] Bancroft asked whether it would not be more correct to word question no. 4 'Not generalizing beyond one's data.'
From Dream to Discovery: On Being a Scientist (1964), 279. In Henry Mintzberg, essay, 'Developing Theory About the Development of Theory,' in Ken G. Smith and Michael A. Hitt, Great Minds in Management: the Theory of Process Development (2005), 361.
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.
Stanza from the Phi Beta Kappa poem 'Under Which Lyre (A Reactionary Tract for the Times)', which Auden wrote and delivered at the 1946 Victory Commencement of Harvard University (Jun 1946). Quoted in Adam Kirsch, 'A Poet's Warning', Harvard Magazine (Nov-Dec 2007) which gives more background on the poem. Also in Collected Poems of W.H. Auden (1976), 262.