Value freedom

• What is value freedom-

  To not let personal prejudices and beliefs influence research methods or findings
• Positivists-

  -Socio should aim to be objective and value free

  -Durkheim- suicide study (personal topic, but made it objective using official statistics to determine how people felt about social change)

  -sociology can be value free as they are uncovering objective laws of how the social system works

  -if the laws were too high or low, levels of social integration would increase suicide rate
• Interpretivists-

  -gromm- social research always has moral and social implications

  -therefore value freedom is an avoidance of responsibility

  -gouldner- the principal of value freedom has dehumanised sociologists. He believes sociologists have personal ambitions which could impinge on research, and a set of moral values which are hard to detach from
• Postmodernism-

  -Reject the idea that any one account of the world is better than another

  -all knowledge is based on values and assumptions

  -Foucault- the way People talk about particular issues is called a discourse. If a discourse is favoured by the powerful it becomes dominant and they gain control over what is considered knowledge

  -avoiding metanarratives (lyotard)
• Counter to postmodernism-

  Can be criticised by others who argue that this is failing to acknowledge that sociologists can uncover trends and correlations to make sense of the world