The following appeared in an article written by Dr. Karp, an anthropologist."Twenty years ago, Dr. Field, a noted anthropologist, visited the island of Tertia and concluded from his observations that children in Tertia were reared by an entire village rat

The author in the statement presents an argument to refuse a method for anthropological studies. He or she emphasizes that just one faulty result of a research on Tertia’s people leads to falsification of the method by which Dr. Field managed the research. But there are some dubious points that weaken Dr. Karp’s argument.

First of all, Dr. Karp cannot refute the observation-centered approach just because it led to one false result. It is a kind of generalization that tries to criticize a method based on one malfunction of its implementation. However, it is not still clear that Dr. Field’s study was certainly mistaken. It is possible that Dr. Karp’s results are wrong. We need more evidence to justify Dr. Karp’s claim concerning the understanding of child-rearing behaviors in Tertia. If these evidences prove the veracity of this theory, then we can argue against Dr. Field’s studies; though we cannot still put the blame on its method.

Dr. Karp’s argument has another faulty aspect. The interviews will not per se prove that children are more reared with their biological parents. That is because they just talk more about them, while there is no clue to indicate that their bio-parents took more care of them than other members of the Tertia tribe. It is imaginable that children tend to talk about their biological parents because they are just more respectable in Tertia’s tradition.

One still can reasonably cast doubt on the validity of the interviews, while students are those who handle them. Maybe Dr. Field’s observations, as a more prominent scholar, are more reliable than those of graduate students of Dr. Karp. It is probable that these students tended to pay more attention to those aspects of interviews that center on issues concerned with family members and biological parents of interviewees. The background assumptions and knowledge of interviewers have a decisive role in handling the data in a research. They need to have a critical attitude toward their presuppositions, as someone who are probably a person from modern families with different structures of society comparing with Tertia’s. Thus, it is possible that interviewers’ assumption misled them to cast similar results to their own family and parenting behavior, on these interviews.

Considering all of these points, including the methodological defeats, one can legitimately cast doubt on Dr. Karp’s argument in refuting Dr. Field’s theory. Dr. Karp needs to form a more solid study on Tertia’s society to be able to refute the rival theory. Nevertheless, that will not be a permission yet to refuse the rival theory’s methodology, as Dr. Karp tries to conclude so.