Value-freedom

Value-freedom is a methodological position that the sociologist Max Weber offered that aimed for the researcher to become aware of their own values during their scientific work, to reduce as much as possible the biases that their own value-judgements could cause.

[1] The demand developed by Max Weber is part of the criteria of scientific neutrality.

According to this concept, the researcher should make of these values an “object”, without passing on them a prescriptive judgement.

[3] In this way, Weber developed a distinction between "value-judgement" and "link to the values".

[4] The original term comes from the German werturteilsfreie Wissenschaft, and was introduced by Max Weber.