The author’s approach to family violence research, focusing on interpersonal violence against other family members, is rooted in experiences and research. A significant amount of the research was conducted despite prevailing beliefs which characterized either the methodology or the theory to be wrong. There are four underlying themes to this article: (1) iconoclasm, (2) importance of making use of chance occurrences to select research topics, (3) the conflict between ideology and evidence, and (4) the role of the personal history and the personality of the researcher in molding a scientific career. The three most well-known criticized aspects of the author’s research on family violence are the National Family Violence Surveys, the research showing that legal and morally correct corporal punishment by parents has serious harmful side effects, and the development of the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS) to measure family violence. References