Gedachten bij het opschrijven van een eindrapport

Samenvatting

The following 'reflections on writing down a final report' take their point of departure from Kenneth Boulding's concept of 'the image.' Every social scientist has his own image of reality. The size and flexibility of this image determine the amount of new information he can digest as well as the way he will digest it. No one's image is equipped to command the whole scope of social reality. We must therefore always be alert and test the information we feel entitled to accept Our information never being perfect, we may feel inclined to banish our doubts by rejecting all information that cannot be tested by rigorous standards. This implies that we lock off the greater part of our image. On the other hand, we may decide to do away with all tests in order to save the possibility of drawing practical conclusions. These att's are only seemingly contradictory. They often occur in the same person. Both make for a shrinking of the image, and are apt to cause a bad conscience on the part of the social scientist who has either to face the unpleasant fact of knowing next to nothing, or to violate his own rigorous standards. If we are to overcome this fatal dilemma, each of us will have to acknowledge the limitation of his own image, and have the courage not to risk a bad conscience by paying tribute to this false idea of objectivity. AA.