Can sociology be value free?

Question

Can sociology be value free?

Answer 1

this is one of the topics that i need to know about in my exam. and i say no lol but if any one can tell me other wise that would help so i can use it in my exam.

Answer 2

It cannot, the best a scholar can do is to lay bare his value position. Value freedom is another word for working within the dominant values!

Answer 3

No.

Answer 4

It tries really, really hard to be. But ethnocentrism is extremely hard to avoid.

All sociological studies have to be approved through an Institutional Review Board before they can be carried out. If a sociologist's proposal seems value-laden (or if there are strong expectations or biases from the researcher), it will not be approved.

Peter Berger (in conjunction with Thomas Luckmann) wrote a hyper-relativist book called The Social Construction of Reality in the 1960's, and it is the most value-free sociological perspective/theory that I've ever come across. You might like it. He talks about the "sociology of knowledge" and the SES/gender/whatever status of an individual will influence his/her perception of reality. He says that mythology, theology, and science are just different ways of means of maintaining one's cultural universe, but he doesn't believe there is any matter in which one is a better method. I wish I were as open as him.