Expert Judgement in Sociology
In the present context expert examination has become an integral
part of such spheres of social activity as executive
decision-making, legislative process, election campaigns,
organizational management, journalism, public relations,
science, education and culture management etc.
Expert services and expert activity have turned into important
form of knowledge functioning, and in the actual period of
society development are valuable kinds of scientific research
and practical project implementation. Though nowadays, there
arose rather contradictory situation: despite expertise becoming
a norm of social life, very forward-looking and prestige form of
activity, far from all methodological problems related to expert
judgments application are elaborated equally profoundly.
The question of elaboration of expert examination theory has
become a subject of interest by many researches from different
fields who founded such discipline as expertology, the science
of general theoretic and methodological issues of receipt and
treatment of expert information. Though, the most frequent
application of this concept occurs in such word combinations as
"judicial expertology", "legal expertology", "medical
expertology" and, unfortunately, rarely in such phrase as
"sociological expertology".
Sociological literature brings up a significant amount of
questions, but profound theoretical elaborations devoted to
particularly methodological aspects of expert judgments
application in sociological research are not enough. Most
scientific authors' works concentrate on procedural aspects of
expert judgment implementation, on keeping to procedural rules
of reliability guarantee in fulfillment of every procedural
point.
The issues of measuring and mathematical processing final
results of expert judgments are worked out in detail. Particular
attention should be attached to social forecasting and planning,
issues of expert judgments application on different stages of
sociological research. However, the essential categories and
object description of sociological expertise stay obscurely
represented. Thus, the problem is the absence of
theoretic-methodological, scientifically grounded basis, which
would provide the possibility to equate expert judgments not
only with the method of primary sociological information
collection or subsidiary instrument on every stage of research,
but also with a certain methodological approach to research of
specific objects of sociological reality. This very
interpretation of expert judgments attracts modern sociological
theories, defining society as informational, democratic, in
which every thought influences the entire community and
knowledge is a system of expert judgments. In accordance with
the structure of scientific knowledge methods, expert methods
can be certainly attributed to general scientific methods along
with such as comparative, historical, mathematical, system
method and others. In that way, it is necessary to solve a
scientific problem: what the status of expert judgment in
sociological research, its cognitive potential, limitations and
sphere of application is.
The scientific research aims at methodological substantiation of
expert judgments method application in sociological research.
The current article suggests paying attention to some aspects of
the problem, which, to the author's opinion, are elaborated
insufficiently neatly or rather skin-deep in the present-day
sociological literature.
In sociology, expert judgment application stipulates for taking
into account subjective reality, such phenomena as thoughts,
values, norms, interests, subjective probabilities, conventional
marks etc. Then, a question arises whether this method can be
considered as individual specific sort of survey, as the
majority of authors consider it to be, or it would be more
appropriate to regard it as subjective judgment. Which is the
status of expert conclusion, can it be considered as scientific
one?
In the processed literature the sense of the concepts of
"sociologic" and "social" expert examination stays
indeterminate: are these concepts equal and is there any sense
to talk of sociological expert examination as such? What
specific traits does the object of expert judgment have, what is
its difference in its sense from mass survey in addition to its
another form of questioner, scope of excerpts and its prognostic
nature?
The question of cognitive potential and spheres of application
of expert judgment method requires elaboration and further
justification, since there is no universal typology of
application spheres and tasks of the method which would cover
all possible cases. Besides limited amount of scientific
research on these issues, every author trying to present certain
classification regards this system in his own way.
Classifications of different authors have almost nothing in
common. This is the evidence of the fact that each of them is
concentrated on narrow frame of tasks done by expert
examination. Therefore it is necessary to elaborate well-founded
typology of application spheres, potential and limitations of
expert judgment in sociological research. Fulfillment of this
task will provide comprehensive answers as to what the cognitive
value of the method is.
In elaboration of typology of expert judgments application
spheres in sociological research, it would be appropriate to
rest on three types of factors defining functioning and
developing complex systems, including social ones.
1. Determined factors, singled out on the basis of strict
determined dependences; 2. ...
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Judgement in Sociology