Values are as important as facts in sociological research. Discuss.

Values are subjective dispositions based on belief, bias, preferences in the framework of desirability.

Importance of values was discarded by positivists like Comte & Durkheim. For them, only observable facts can give unbiased objective universal laws.

However, with advent of other schools & perspectives this was challenged.

Critical school led by Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer

call for revealing values of dominant ruling class to make Sociology an emancipatory discipline.

Weberian interpretative perspective calls for understanding of actor's meanings of action which display her values.

Further, phenomenology builds on the life world which is seated by common sensical values making them central to research.

For post modernists, there is no complete gospel & even Sociology itself is nothing but values.