Finally, objectivity is a skill, like language fluency, and you can build it if you work at it. Some people build more of it, others less. More is better.
If an objective measurement is one made by a robot—that is, a machine that is not prone to the kind of measurement error that comes from having opinions and memories—then no human being can ever be completely objective. We can’t rid ourselves of our experiences, and I don’t know anyone who thinks it would be a good idea even to try.
We can, however, become aware of our experiences, our opinions, our values. We can hold our field observations up to a cold light and ask whether we’ve seen what we wanted to see, or what is really out there. The goal is not for us, as humans, to become objective machines; it is for us to achieve objective—that is, accurate—knowledge by transcending our biases. No fair pointing out that this is impossible. Of course, it’s impossible to do completely. But it’s not impossible to do at all. Priests, social workers, clinical psychologists, and counselors suspend their own biases all the time, more or less, in order to listen hard and give sensible advice to their clients.
((H. Russell Bernard "Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches")
If an objective measurement is one made by a robot—that is, a machine that is not prone to the kind of measurement error that comes from having opinions and memories—then no human being can ever be completely objective. We can’t rid ourselves of our experiences, and I don’t know anyone who thinks it would be a good idea even to try.
We can, however, become aware of our experiences, our opinions, our values. We can hold our field observations up to a cold light and ask whether we’ve seen what we wanted to see, or what is really out there. The goal is not for us, as humans, to become objective machines; it is for us to achieve objective—that is, accurate—knowledge by transcending our biases. No fair pointing out that this is impossible. Of course, it’s impossible to do completely. But it’s not impossible to do at all. Priests, social workers, clinical psychologists, and counselors suspend their own biases all the time, more or less, in order to listen hard and give sensible advice to their clients.
((H. Russell Bernard "Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches")
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