ABSTRACT
Those who wish to study people as social beings face a paradox. On the one hand behavioural and mental health research appears to be most rigorously scientific when it controls and simplifies the phenomena to be studied. To do this people are often studied under laboratory or ‘test’ conditions and study is often concentrated on certain properties or functions of individual people without reference to their social environments. To do research with people in their social settings, on the other hand, it is necessary to leave the security of that familiar kind of research and venture out into territory where nothing seems controlled or controllable and where all is complexity and interdependence. The intending researcher of people-in-settings may very reasonably ask whether science is possible at all under those circumstances. I hope to convince the reader of this chapter that it is.
