The objectives and benefits of social research always have to be judged in relation to some current or perceived future decision problem of society. It is not always obvious what is important, and to decide on this question is in principle not the task of the researcher himself. He only represents professional and technical skills.
The experience from social research, however, as well as from most other lines of research, is that the first and most important task is to identify the nature of the problem. What are the goals? What are we interested in? Hence, it is very difficult to remove subjective elements from the work of individual researchers. Constant confrontation of theories and hypotheses with empirical measurement and the involvement of many persons' judgments are the best guarantees of quality, reliability and relevance of scientific progress. Theories that do not naturally expose themselves to the risk of being rejected by observation or that do not incorporate a proper measurement technique ten d to evade this time-honored criterion of scientific procedure.