Comparative Studies

This past week, I had coffee with a friend who is thinking of moving to Ireland for graduate school. When she mentioned that she saw this move as a way of finding a better professional "fit" for herself, I mentioned that similar drives had led to my move to Israel and that I'd found it a very successful and fulfilling endeavor in that capacity.

When she heard my story about Israel, she suggested that I blog about the events leading up to my decision to move to a foreign country. For now, I won't do that. Instead, I will focus on our ensuing discussion, which dealt with the relevance and applicability of personal experience. She argued about the fundamental commonalities of the human experience (especially among peers). I'm not sure I agree.

This is actually kind of odd given how zealous a proponent I am of comparative politics. Despite the uniqueness of each national context, I fervently believe in our ability to identify meaningful common variables and common trends across political units.

However, for some reason, I don't feel that my life experience can be analyzed in the same way. On the contrary, I feel that trying to generalize my personal experience is even self-aggrandizing, based on the old adage that "the plural of anecdote is not data." Granted, if we're insisting on being data-driven, then one could argue that, in some studies, it's possible to use multiple events over time from within the same case study (in this case, a person). But, arguably, in that case, the most one could extrapolate would be some sort of information about future behavior of the person being studied. Yet, even though that is the case, it's quite common for people to turn to their friends for advice. It's possible that the advice could be relatively reliable if said friends based their commentary not only on personal experience but on the compilation of the experiences of many people. But even assuming that people did that (and, really, is that a reasonable assumption?) how large and varied would the sample size need to be to be relevant? At what point during interpersonal discussions are anecdotes sufficiently scientific and generalizable to be helpful? Or is their added value merely meant to be inspirational, if they are happy anecdotes? I really have no idea.