Final answer:
Before making judgments about how the world should be (normative approach), it's crucial to understand the world as it is (descriptive approach). Descriptive research provides a factual basis for making informed decisions or judgments, ensuring that normative conclusions are relevant and applicable.
Step-by-step explanation:
It's important to utilize a descriptive approach before engaging in a normative approach for a fundamental reason: understanding the reality of a situation is essential before proposing how a situation should be altered or maintained. The descriptive approach, often aligned with positive statements, seeks to analyze and explain the world as it is. This means gathering data, identifying trends, asking questions, and establishing a baseline of knowledge about actual behaviors and events. In contrast, the normative approach is associated with normative statements, prescribing how things ought to be based on values, judgments, or ideal conditions. Engaging in normative analyses or judgments without first understanding the real context may lead to misguided conclusions that do not reflect the complexities or actualities of the subject matter. For example, researchers and scholars might craft policies or theories that are unfeasible or ineffective because they're based on an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the situation they are attempting to improve or critique. That's why sociologists, economists, and other researchers often prioritize descriptive research as the fundamental first step before proceeding to normative claims. Research methods, such as the scientific method, help ensure that observations and analyses are systematically grounded in empirical reality.