I said
the devil is in the details. "A living individual" IMHO disqualifies
imaginary personas and as long as you can't rule them out, you write off your entire work (even if we talk of just one in a hundred.).
Jeremy responded
I'm not sure I understand where you are going here? I don't need 'real' people to talk about the things that I need, I just need the results to be created by either humans or created by something that human creates. It is perfectly valid, but then I'm not dealing explicitly with human subjects either. The point is very simple ; unless your results can be traced back to specific individuals then they can't be treated as valid. In an Internet board for example anyone can log in with multiple aliases and publish opinions. Problem is that the researcher can do that too, create multiple imaginary aliases and force his opinion as something "out there". You do need some very real people in order to prove that your work is valid and not something pulled out of a hat.
I said
Name one field of research which does not "need" identifiable
individual subjects. I'm not aware of any.
Jeremy responded
sociology, anthropology, musicology, literary studies, anything that does not require methodological individualism, which is most fields of research. Even some topics of research that do no sometimes require methodological individualism don't require identifiable subjects. In fact, I'd say those that ''need'' identifiable individual subjects are probably in the minority in terms of research I can't really see that in any of those examples. All of those fields deal in the study of concrete human cultural output. You seem to confuse the actual quoting of names with the existence of identifiable individuals. You can't just say "we conclude on the basis of our observations that x stands and y doesn't", the natural question by any reader would be "so what or whom did you observe, what was his demographics, for how long did you observe him/her, how many times, etc. ?" You need not identify them on print but you certainly need to have records of their existence and/or records of you spending time in the field doing the observations, or records of which cultural produce you studied (which again implies creators hence individuals with names). Just because you may be a conscientious researcher don't mean everyone else is. The recent example of that Korean guy springs in mind. I don't really think that research w/o those characteristics can even be considered, in principle, reproducible .
George