Basing a model upon subjective perception

[lucedan]

I stumbled upon an article that includes a research process that I cannot understand. The authors try to investigate the perception of musical works of two groups, one of expert listeners (15 people) and one of non-expert listeners (25 people).

All listeners have to take a test, and do the following tasks: 1) listen to the musical piece and place a number of markers where they perceive something important is happening; 2) associate a degree of strength to these markers to report how important is that event; 3) associate with the marker a quality available on a list provided by the authors.

However, to study these groups, the authors don't just collect the results and compare the two groups between each other. What they do is to compare these results to a "model."

This model is made by the research team through the same tasks taken by the listeners. The authors report that "it is essential to the methodology of the experiment that the test subjects performed exactly the same steps that were used in the model analyses. Thus, the model analyses can be understood as hypotheses for the results of the experiment."

Therefore, since I perceive something in some way, I expect you to perceive something in the same way, and I use my own perception to analyze and discuss your responses.

Is this a valid methodology?

P.S. I report the quote for clarity. If this is considered plagiarism, let me know and I paraphrase the quote.