One option is to enlarge the committee. Another is to work with a consultant. I see nothing wrong with a committee bringing itself up to speed. In fact, APA ethics require that practitioners get supervision/help rather than winging it. I think that an analogous principle applies in research. Getting help/supervison is not only ethically ok, but failure to do so can be unethical.
I did my dissertation on how people on the Hill perceived the similarity of potential candidates for President in 1976. I did a 10*10 INDSCAL on 205 respondents. I obtained guidance from Doug Carroll who invented INDSCAL. Few research projects had ever used it. I revised the software to handle such a huge analysis. My advisor was editor of Psychometrika for many years and a factor analyst since the 40's and a pioneer in clustering. He had no experience with INDSCAL but read the materials in my bibliography. I recruited committee members with broad social psych and methods backgrounds for the other members. . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
