Objectivity and Values in Sociology

Comte and Durkheim

They believed that it was not a matter of subjective values or personal opinions of what was 'best' - they shared the Enlightenment/modernist view of the role of sociology: as a science, the role of sociology was to discover the truth about how society works, uncovering the laws that govern its proper functioning so that social problems can be solved and human life improved.

Scientific sociology was believed to be able to reveal the one 'correct' society, giving sociologists a crucial role as they would be able to say objectively and with scientific certainty what was really best for society - they would be able to decribe how things ought to be.

Comte regarded sociology as the 'queen of sciences' and saw sociologists as latter-day high priests of a new scientific religion of truth.

Marx saw himself as a scientist as he believed that his method of historical analysis, historical materialism, could reveal the line of development in human society (one that evolved through different types of class-based societies and will end with a classless communist society).

The role of Marx's sociology was to reveal the truth of the development of human society, especially to the proletariat as they would be the class to overthrow capitalism and herald the birth of the communist society.
Thus, Marx took for granted the value of the ideal communist society and argues that his scientific approach will show us how to reach it.

He is similar in that he sees science as helping to 'deliver' the good society.
They also all tended not to see a distinction between the facts as revealed by science and the values that we should hold as they believed that science could tell us what these should be.

Weber makes a sharp disctinction between value judgements and facts and he argues that we cannot derive the one from the other.

Research may establish the fact that divorcess are more likely to commit suicide. However, this does not logically demonstrate the truth of the value judgement that we should make divorce harder to obtain as there is nothing about the fact that logically compels us to accept the value. eg. We might argue that we should make it harder to get married (another value) or that people have every tight to commit suicide if they wish (a third value). None of these three value judgements are 'proven' by the established fact - a value can neither be proved or disproved by the facts: they belong to different realms.

Despite this, Weber still saw an essential role for values in sociological research. We can divide his views into four stages of the research process.

Weber took that idea that social reality is made up of a 'meaningless infinity' of facts that make it impossible to study it in its totality.
Therefore, the best the researtcher can do is to select certain facts and stuy these.

In Weber's view, we can only select them in terms of what we regard as important based on our own values - their value relevance to us.
Values are thus essential in enabling us to select which aspects of reality to study and in developing these concepts withwhich to understand these aspects. eg. Feminists value gender equality and this leads them to study women's oppression and to develop concepts such as patriarchy with which to understand it.

Weber believes we must be as objective and unbiased as possible when we are collecting the facts and this means keeping our values and prejudices out of the process. eg. We should not ask leading questions to give answers of what we want to hear.
Hypotheses must stand or fall solely on whether or not it fits the observed facts so values must be kept our of the process here, too.

Values become important again when we come to interpret the data we have collected.

Facts should be set in a theoretical framework so that we can understand their significance and draw conclusions from them.