I had a friend who was not very good at money management. He was careless about his expenses, earnings, and savings. He owed me some money so I decided that to receive it back sooner I could give him a friendly piece of advice on how to handle his finances. Firstly, I thought of a reason why he could not save any sum in his wallet for long. My suggestion was that he was from a wealthy family where money was in abundance, and he always could replenish his cash stock. Therefore, I decided to tell him that if he wanted to be rich like his parents, he needed to control his income and expenses. He said that he would try. I received my money back, but the friend did not follow my advice to my current knowledge.
Comparison of a Problem-Solving Case with the Scientific Method
The steps that I used to solve my problem were similar to the scientific method. I had an initial hypothesis that if I gave my friend a piece of advice on money management, I would receive my loan back sooner. Then I chose an intervention – informal verbal advice. Memorizing his reply, meeting to collect the money, and checking on his lifestyle were my ways of data collection. The data analysis involved me using correlation and juxtaposing his handling skills before and after my advice concluding that they did not improve, making note that there is some influence of advising on paying debts.
It seems that my problem-solving method resembles the scientific method in its logic and follows the same order. It has all of the stages of such an approach from forming a hypothesis to concluding. The difference was that I pursued two separate goals at once: I wanted my money returned to me, and I wanted to help my friend become a better version of himself. To my mind, in the scientific method, there is a tendency to focus on thoroughly researching a particular topic, or investigating an area to find something of interest.