Social Science Essay -- Research Methods, Objective Research

According to the dictionary of Merriam-Webster, Objective is defined as "expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations". And the Cambridge Dictionary has the similar definition: â€Å"based on real facts and not influenced by personal beliefs or feelings.† It is obvious that to be objective, personal opinions on the research question or hypothesis have to be eliminated in the research design, research process and report method. It is the aim of any kind of research to be objective, which means the result can show more effective information and can be generalized to more situations. Almost all the books about social science research method discuss the research should be objective, and more focus on how to be objective. They declare that the research method can determine the research results are objective or not (Fowler, 2009. etc.). In particular, the research methods such as randomly selected participants, Latin Square for inter-subject experiment levels arrangement, and double-blind experience, etc. are designed to make the research objective. It seems that the objectivity is an "automatic assumption if the tools are sufficiently scientific". (Cassel, 2002). However, the paper which discusses the probability of the research results are not objective can hardly be found. Considering the research of social science focuses more on the complex human behaviours (Jackson, 2007), conflict study as one subject of the social science, in my opinion, is impossible to be objective. Because human behaviours are complex, which are effected by changing of mood or emotion, situations around themselves and the information from outside, the inter-personal interac... ...ls as possible in the quantitative research paper, and discover the certain factors which related to the conflict, such as cultural background, religion, economics situation and so on. Then it will be easier for the following research to compare the research results, and obtain more information. Nowadays, the subjective evaluation is a popular research topic, such as the subjective evaluation on happiness, on workload and on stress. I suppose this kind of research approach may be suitable for the studies on conflict situation, because conflict situation is related to human’s emotion and behaviours, thus it should be more effective to ask the subjects to evaluate their own subjective levels, and do the statistics with the values based on subjective evaluation. The results can also be compared between groups, and obtain the â€Å"subjective† conclusion based on data.