The Vast Majority of Sociology is Useless.

Kind of sad that my opponent has delayed rebutting any of my points until later, since for example, it leaves what should have been a strong conclusion to their round "...The uselessness of this field must be realized," of questionable merit considering it stands in direct contrast to the unchallenged three fairly broad areas to which it has been shown to be extremely useful, lifesaving even. Burden As should be clear, I am using a tactic of showing uses of Sociology to cast doubt on the resolution (plus going a step father to show it in general being useful), rather than exclusively countering my opponent. My opponent to show the Vast Majority (not as high as 100%, nor as low as 51%) to be useless ("of no use; not serving the purpose or any purpose; unavailing or futile"), has given an in depth look at a very limited number of cases, which even if the impacts of my case were ignored, may or may not be sufficient to cast doubt on the vast majority of the field. Rebuttals Rebuttal Section 1: Paradigm of the Secularization Steve Bruce's study of declining religion; we booth agree the subject to be of use, but my opponent insists the study of the subject to be useless due to less than perfect research methodologies. For starters "it is impossible to regard participants as entirely honest since they may be influenced by group think and the likes of social desirability bias." This is true, people motivated by social pressure to lie, are indeed more likely to lie. Someone motivated by their community to pretend to be religious, when they secretly don't enjoy community mandated church attendance and the like, are still outwardly behaving as if religious, thus their answers remain a fine indicator of the general level of religiosity in their area. Bear in mind, we're discussing the "study of social behavior." If it would also be useful to conduct deep individual interviews to learn why someone really ticks, does not negate the use of generalizations about their larger community. "collectively accumulating all sorts of extraneous variables" Extraneous variables are a useful part of any research design. By collecting them, a simple drill down on the data allows identification of potential confounding variables which if not spotted would risk invalidating the conclusions [13]. It may be important to note that if someone learns from a mistake, the mistake itself was not useless since it served a purpose. Let's say I want to know if men or women have on average higher ELO scores (it entertains me), I survey 100 active DDO users asking gender and ELO, and conclude women are in the lead by some margin. Not having extraneous variables just ruined my study, because it's likely the gender is coincidental when the real connection is to lurking variables like age, or time on site, etc. If I included the extra variables in the research, I can control for them to acutely determine if there's any meaningful connection between the original two variables I wanted to study. As a humorous example of what happens when you don't gather extraneous data: "What’s the point of gathering a conglomerate amount of social funds and social agencies just to publish a study that only provides a level of religiosity?" I think the main answer is contained within this question: To publish a study that provides the general level of religiosity. Plus, publish a book and make money. Not to mention it's of "use to certain individuals, particularly to those that harbor anti-religious sentiments" (I admit to not being clear how it is of use to them, but I'm not the one making that claim). Rebuttal Section 2: Inherent Founding-Father Biasness The resolution deals clearly with uselessness, not if it is negative (I think my R2 covered what a boon it is, but to be thorough...). Saying something is bad because "Karl Marx, Simone De Beauvoir and Antonio Gramsci" were pioneers of it, implies various broad reaching actions tied to their names, which is a nice pathos appeal, but actually implies Sociology as being quite useful no matter if we dislike some of those uses. Rebuttal Section 3: Alternatives to Quantitative Research A lot of crossover with the above; and as noted at the start of this round, my non-contested case from last round. "Any infraction will cloud the data with subjective results and so will ultimately nullify any objective sense of the case study." This assumes that something must be objective to be of any use. If an area has a social trend of say tipping Smart Cars [13], I need not know the objective odds of my car getting vandalized, to deduce it's best not to leave it parked there overnight. If I'm traveling in an area prone to STD's [14], I don't need study conducted with perfect objectivity to tell me I need to be extra careful. Getting deeper, to understand what social habits lead to the spread of diseases, helps decrease their spread. The alternative of ignoring it leads to numerous problems [15]. Rebuttal Section 4: The Queue of Legitimate Concerns "If the priority of attaining religious understanding weighs less than solving current crisis such as the issues with modern health problems, then social scientists must give way to those concerns." Why must it? If Steve Bruce studied cancer instead of religion, at best he'd just be one more researcher among thousands, cancer would not magically be cured by his dedication. If he studied war in the Middle East, as evidenced by the countless people already trying to broker peace, we would still not have peace there. That something is not useful to everyone, does not mean it's useful to no one. That it's not of optimum utility, does not mean it is of zero utility. "Nobody cares if society has a predisposition to religion" This seems dangerously close to claiming that the sociologists who study it, along with the evangelizing populations of the world, are somehow not people. Care to elaborate? ... I consider this point to have been self-refuted already in R2 with the statement of how useful such studies are to anyone with "anti-religious sentiments." "nobody cares whether the researcher encounters difficulties in observing as a participant" Anyone wanting to understand the meaning of their results, is very likely to care how the study was conducted, which goes hand in hand with what difficulties they encountered. ... I've of course already named various scenarios where not understanding the details, still allows sociology to be of benefit to us. Sources [12] http://dissertation.laerd.com... [13] http://www.nbcbayarea.com... [14] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... [15] http://www.advocatesforyouth.org...