To be a good psychological researcher, one should be able to tolerate ambiguity. A true Psychology is a young and messy enterprise. There is no mandate in necessity, nature, or society which dictates the form this enterprise should take, and so one would expect that psychological researchers like myself would benefit from life on the open range. So let us be frontiersmen and pioneers.

• Vocation
  

  Frontier research is driven by motives contrary to career objectives. Frontier research begins with an appetite of sorts that ranges from a superhuman craving for knowledge to a mystical infatuation. The insatiable childlike curiosity suggests an intrinsic if not innate connection between the personality of the researcher and the phenomenon which exerts the fascination. The frontier researcher feels compelled to know more about the phenomenon and senses that the phenomenon is itself an extension of his or her character. There is a sense that the phenomenon is a catalyst for self-development or perhaps the prima materia through which one's self will unfold according to its own design and unto its natural conclusion.
  

• Phenomenon
  

  The fascination emanates from the raw experience itself, unfiltered by constructs or formal education. This is not a learned or acquired interest. This may be a phenomenon to which the frontier researcher has had access since childhood. It may be dreaming. It may be physical attraction. This is a natural curiosity for a fixed and perhaps timeless feature of the psyche's landscape, a condition of the planet so to speak, as basic as a blue sky.
  

• Creative Control
  

  The frontier researcher is inspired to create original methodologies that broadly interface with the whole of the phenomenon. The construction of the methodology may reflect (be informed by) his or her own treasured experiences. The frontier researcher easily feels contaminated or constrained by influences extraneous to his or her interface with the phenomenon, to the early personal experiences and to the conduit he or she seeks to create in the form of an empirical methodology.
  

• Exploration
  

  Frontier research is ground floor research. It is phased and fluid and the data collected reflect and respect the scope and depth of the factual fabric in which the phenomenon of interest is embedded. The frontier researcher is sensitive to the difference between facts and data and wishes to design a high fidelity instrument that can preserve the integrity of the facts before they are quantified or coded. The exploratory nature of frontier research means that it is meticulously, indefatigably informal. It works hard to resist any and all tendencies to foreclose before the possibilities are exhausted, accounted for, and represented in the final analysis. There are no artificial constructs or devices. Few assumptions. No hypotheses. No inferences. No conclusions. It is the first stage in a science that should be a confluence of descriptive and inferential statistics, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, idiographic and nomothetic units, and exploratory and confirmatory analysis. Frontier research does not test hair-brained hypotheses, but generates the questions worth asking.
  

  The frontier researcher uses numbers descriptively, with a keen eye to the relationships he or she wants captured for subsequent analysis, and in some cases creatively, with a fundamental yet advanced appreciation for how dynamic or diverse phenomena can be depicted by mathematical relations. He or she is not limited to the required regurgitation of that rote pair of descriptive statistics, the mean and standard deviation, and may even invent his or her own. Numbers are more than simply labels that reflect the simplistic features of the phenomena or that are solicited from a questionnaire respondent. Before a number is even determined, there is often a great deal of reflection and detectivework -- extensive qualitative fact collection which will inform the number, range, and criteria for the numbers selected and that will inform all the ways these numbers could be compared and contrasted to create new statistics.
  

  Frontier researchers are free-wheeling in the use of their intellect and they remain intimate with the phenomena of interest. They are a loose collection of divergent thinkers bringing a diverse package of wits to bear on a diverse range of phenomena. They do whatever is necessary to minimize the middle men that distance themselves from their wits and from their phenomena of interest.