Boas to Mead - Feb. 15, 1926:

My dear Margaret,

I was very glad to receive today, three letters from you, a little personal note, a letter with the enclosure to Dr. Lillie also containing the report and your letter in which you asked me a few questions.

I have written to Washington and told them that you expect to be here in New York next year and that you will have an opportunity to work up your material here and that it would be unwise to have you interrupt your work now in order to write a report. Considering this I do not think that you need worry just at present about the question of the final formulation of your results.

However, I am anxious to answer your questions as well as I can, although I am quite aware that I think in the progress of your work you will find yourself the best way of presentation and that some of the difficulties that upset you in the beginning will be disappeared [original text].

I am very decidedly of the opinion that a statistical treatment of such an intricate behavior as the one that you are studying, will not have very much meaning and that the characterization of a selected number of cases must necessarily be the material with which you have to operate. Statistical work will require the tearing out of its natural setting, some particular aspect of behavior which, without that setting, may have no meaning whatever. A complete elimination of the subjective use of the investigator is of course quite impossible in a matter of this kind but undoubtedly you will try to overcome this so far as that is at all possible. I rather imagine that you might like to give a somewhat summarized description of the behavior of the whole group or rather of the conditions under which the behavior develops as you have indicated in your letter to the Research Council and then set off the individual against the background.

If you should give a purely statistical treatment I fear that the description would resemble the results of a questionnaire which I personally consider of doubtful value.

I am under the impression that you have to follow somewhat the method that is used by medical men in the analysis of individual cases on which is built up the general picture of the pathological courses that they want to describe. There would be no difficulty in guarding yourself by referring to the variety of personal behavior that you will find.

I hope that the hurricane has not disturbed your work too much. Perhaps it is quite interesting to see how the people behave under stress.

I wonder whether you will not find, when this letter arrives, that you have answered your own question better than I can do it from here. However, I want to help you as much as I can.