Standardization Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Standardization Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Standardization is a procedure used in science to increase validity and reliability. It assumes that objective scientific findings ought to be non-contradictory and replicable and that the best way to achieve this is to ensure that research instruments and methods remain uniform within a particular study and from one study to the next.

The concept standardization is used in two distinct but related senses in science. In a purely descriptive sense, standardization establishes a lingua franca, facilitating confidence among researchers that they and others are gathering new knowledge about the same empirical phenomena. In the second sense, standardization ensures excellence. In this sense, standards not only keep research uniform but keep it “good.” In survey research, considerable efforts are made to both promote the standardization of question formats and other kinds of measurement instruments across studies and to ensure uniformity of procedure amongst interviewers working on the same study.

Critics of standardization sometimes argue that procedures that ensure findings can be replicated do not ensure those findings are valid. Other critics suggest that standardization inevitably entails coercion as proponents of different standardized procedures wrangle with one another for supremacy. Still others suggest that standardized methods can impose artificial frameworks on research that might distort rather than improve understanding. These critics suggest that a more naturalistic and spontaneous approach can sometimes facilitate a more nuanced sensitivity to the nature of phenomena under investigation.

More recently, sociologists of science have shown that the use of standardized procedures must inevitably require discretionary assessments as to whether those procedures have been implemented properly. Because these discretionary assessments themselves can never be fully reduced to standardized protocols, we must remain cognizant of the fact that standardization can never completely eliminate the idiosyncratic influence of specific individuals and specific social contexts on the conduct of scientific research.

Bibliography:

Maynard, D. W., Houtkoop-Steenstra, H., Schaeffer, N. , & van der Zouwen, J. (eds.) (2001) Standardization and Tacit Knowledge: Interaction and Practice in the Survey Interview. Wiley Interscience, New York.
Timmermans, S. & Berg, M. (2003) The Gold Standard: The Challenge of Evidence-Based Medicine and Standardization in Health Care. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.