Neutral Question Essay

A neutral question can be defined as “a request for information taking no sides, free from marked bias or partiality.” It would appear that all true questions should be neutral. If a question is not neutral, it tends towards a statement, or a judgment, disguised as a question. Neutral questions are ones that allow the respondent to decide upon answers without overt direction or pressure from the questioner. They are usually contrasted with leading questions. Leading question are ones where the questioner leads the respondent toward a particular answer by making "it easier or more tempting for the respondent to give one answer than another." Questioner bias can be obvious in the tone or the manner in which the question is asked. It may be …show more content…
Indeed, the possibility for objectivity or neutrality, for both the subjects of an investigation and the investigators making value-free judgments, and hence not affecting the outcome with their beliefs and feelings, is a much-debated issue. Many human science scholars believe that you can apply the methods of natural science to the study of social behavior, and treat human subjects just as you do animals or objects in the natural world. They are known as ‘naturalists’. The other school of thought, known as ‘interpretivists’, believe that value-free judgments in the human sciences are impossible to make, and also undesirable. These approaches have a difference not only in method but also in aim, which makes it even harder to reach consensus. Moreover, naturalists mainly focus on quantitative data that is gathered by surveys, questionnaires, study of statistics, and other generally mathematically measurable values, believing that this provides ‘hard’, less refutable knowledge about a topic. On the other hand, ‘interpretivists’, seeks to gather more personal information, and provides evidence that is often descriptive rather than numerically based. Thus, the different ‘paradigms’ that coexist in Human Sciences also differ in their preferred ways of knowing. In fact, Kuhn described the Human Sciences as being at a ‘pre-paradigmatic stage’, or in other words, not yet offering results that are accepted by everyone as ‘true’. Instead, we tend to see society through the lenses of various schools or paradigms be it Marxism, Liberalism, Feminism, or whatever else seems to offer us a logical picture of the world. Such lenses, just like paradigms, will also cause questions and inquiry to be less that