Clerks and staff members often exaggerate the importance of their roles in the decisionmaking process, thus making their observations inaccurate and unreliable. Researchers should focus, then, on asking the clerks and staff members about their jobs and should not ask them to comment on the ways the justices make decisions. If a researcher listens carefully during interviews at the Supreme Court, he can often obtain data that validate quantitative research. 5 footnotes.