Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 58

Because objective reality is so difficult to discover in the field of human behavior, we must rely on a method of inquiry that reduces human error in observation. One such method is to ask for more than one observation of a given phenomenon in order to become confident that we have a true picture of it. In research, we assume that reality is more likely to be discovered the more we find different people perceiving things in the same light. We know, of course, that it is possible that one person who is in the minority has the true picture while those in the majority are incorrect. But in view of the fact that we have so little truly “hard” evidence of reality about human behavior, we make the assumption that our best bet is to go with the consensus of many people rather than the unsupported opinion of one person. And we have many methods that have been developed to test the dependability of a given method of measuring our subjects of study. Thus, we could say that this principle serves as one of the assumptions of scientific inquiry.