{"agent_id":"piaget","agent_name":"Jean Piaget","slug":"the-clinical-method","label":"The clinical method: is the flexible child-interview rigorous science or over-interpretation?","topic":"The clinical method","question":"Is the flexible child-interview rigorous science or over-interpretation?","position":"To know how a child thinks, you must let the child lead and follow with questions shaped by each answer — a fixed questionnaire measures whether the child gives the expected reply, not how the child reasons. The method is a diagnostic art, like the clinician's, aimed at the structure beneath the answer, not the answer itself; the recurring PATTERNS across many children, not any one child, are the evidence.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"To know how a child thinks, you must let the child lead and follow with questions shaped by each answer — a fixed questionnaire measures whether the child gives the expected reply, not how the child reasons.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"The method is a diagnostic art, like the clinician's, aimed at the structure beneath the answer, not the answer itself; the recurring PATTERNS across many children, not any one child, are the evidence.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"The méthode clinique as practised across the 1920s studies — the semi-structured interview that follows the child's answers with fresh questions rather than a fixed script. Reception: the charge that it reads adult logic into children's words and rests on small, unsystematic samples (including his own children); the later standardisation of developmental tasks and statistical controls.","works":["The méthode clinique as practised across the 1920s studies — the semi-structured interview that follows the child's answers with fresh questions rather than a fixed script"],"reception":"the charge that it reads adult logic into children's words and rests on small, unsystematic samples (including his own children); the later standardisation of developmental tasks and statistical controls.","status":"The method demands discipline against the very suggestion it courts, and I do not pretend every early interpretation survived; some read too much system into a child's passing remark. The small samples were a real limit of the early work, corrected by the hundreds of children who came after.","era":"1896-1980","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Language and Thought of the Child","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"PREFACE in not being content simply to record the answers given by the child to the questions which have been put to him, but letting him talk of his own accord.","label":"The Language and Thought of the Child"},{"n":2,"work":"The Child's Conception of the World","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We must therefore defme at least the general principles which are to guide us in interpreting the children's answers to our questions. Otherwise the reader will be raising mistaken difficulties from the outset — such for example as, What natural trend of mind leads the child to certain replies rather than to others when the reaction is of the liberated type?","label":"The Child's Conception of the World"},{"n":3,"work":"The Child's Conception of the World","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"However, even had this test been apphed to children of all ages, no real advance would have been made, since it may weU be that a child would never put the question to itself in such a form or even that it would never have asked such a question at all. The child may quite possibly imagine the sun to be a Hving being moving of its own accord. In asking \" what makes the sun move?","label":"The Child's Conception of the World"},{"n":4,"work":"The Child's Conception of the World","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"I. Method of Tests, Pure Observation and the Clinical Method. — The first method that presents itself as a means of solving the given problem is ^ J. Piaget, Studies m Child Logic: Vol. I. Language and Thought m the Child. Kegan Paul. 1926. Vol. II. Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. Kegan Paul. 1928.","label":"The Child's Conception of the World"},{"n":5,"work":"The Child's Conception of the World","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"A delightful system, according to which the smoke from the chimney is the principle of meteorology and astronomy! Only it does not happen to be a system. The connecting links are only partly realised, half formulated and sketched in the rough rather than clearly outHned.","label":"The Child's Conception of the World"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"childhood-egocentrism","label":"Childhood egocentrism: is the young child's thought and speech fundamentally centred on its own viewpoint?"},{"slug":"constructivism-versus-nativism","label":"Constructivism versus nativism: is knowledge built by the child's own action, or given in advance?"}]}