Rethinking the Research Object in Social Sciences

In social science research, defining the “object of study” sounds straightforward – pick a topic, design your method, collect your data. But this first step is far more consequential than it appears. The way a researcher frames and defines the subject of investigation shapes every conclusion that follows. When those definitions rest on unexamined assumptions about what society or culture “really is,” the resulting research can misrepresent the very phenomena it seeks to explain. This is what problematising the object of study is about: subjecting those foundational definitions to critical scrutiny before the research even begins.

What does “object of study” mean in social sciences? 🔗

In any research project, the object of study is the central subject, phenomenon, or process under investigation – whether that is a social behavior, cultural practice, institutional structure, or collective identity. It forms the foundation around which research questions, methods, and interpretations are built. A sociologist might study caste dynamics in rural India, the effects of digital activism, or access to healthcare in urban communities. Each of these becomes the object around which the entire research enterprise is organised.

The challenge is that in the social and behavioral sciences, studies are most often framed around examining a problem that needs to be understood in order to improve society. This framing, however, is never neutral. It reflects the researcher’s assumptions, the dominant theoretical frameworks of their field, and the cultural moment in which the research takes place. Before a single interview is conducted or a survey distributed, choices have already been made about what the object is, what counts as relevant, and who gets to define the boundaries.

The problem with “natural” or fixed definitions 🔗

Social science has long operated under the influence of natural science models, treating social phenomena as though they were clearly bounded, stable objects waiting to be observed and measured. In the natural sciences, objects of analysis – atoms, forests, planets – are assumed to be clearly separate from the researcher. But when we study the family, education, or culture, we are part of these things, for we live, think, and communicate within them.

This is the subject-object problem: in social science, the researcher is simultaneously the subject conducting the inquiry and part of the very social world being studied. A researcher studying poverty is embedded in an economic system. A researcher studying gender norms has been shaped by those norms. There is no purely detached vantage point from which social reality can be observed as if through a laboratory window. Pretending otherwise doesn’t eliminate that embeddedness – it just makes it invisible and harder to account for.

Traditional approaches have also tended to define concepts like “society,” “culture,” or “the family” as if they were self-evident, universally understood categories. But critical social research attempts to go beneath surface appearance by critically engaging with prevailing conceptualisations of the social world, questioning taken-for-granted definitions and exposing the historical and ideological conditions that produced them.

How assumptions shape research outcomes 🔗

The definitions researchers adopt at the outset are rarely arbitrary – they reflect and reinforce broader ideological, cultural, and historical assumptions. When early sociologists studied “the family,” they largely studied a specific model: the Western, nuclear, heterosexual household. This definition excluded vast swaths of human experience, not because those experiences didn’t exist, but because the object of study had already been defined in a way that rendered them invisible.

Similarly, when the concept of “culture” is treated as a static set of values shared by a given group, it misses how culture actually operates – as something continuously negotiated, adapted, and contested across changing social conditions. Treating culture as fixed leads researchers to produce accounts that are accurate about a snapshot but misleading about the process.

These are not minor methodological errors. Established methods of generating research questions in the social sciences tend to focus on “gap-spotting” – looking for lacks in existing literature – which means existing theories and their underlying assumptions remain largely unchallenged. Problematisation, by contrast, involves directly challenging those assumptions, asking not just “what hasn’t been studied?” but “why have we been framing this the way we have?”

Culture and society as processes, not fixed structures 🔗

A key insight from critical and poststructuralist traditions is that “society” and “culture” are not things – they are processes. They are produced and reproduced through ongoing human action, shaped by power, history, economics, and contestation. Cultural change is a matter that can be questioned and researched precisely because culture is dynamic, not static.

Poststructuralist thinking inspired cultural sociologists to engage in rigorous critique of discourses that claim closure and classification – meaning that any attempt to definitively pin down what “culture” or “society” is should itself be treated with suspicion. Such definitions always leave something out. They always encode a perspective. And the perspective they encode most often reflects those with the most power to shape academic agendas.

This does not mean all definitions are equally wrong, or that research is impossible without perfect objectivity. It means that definitions must be treated as starting points open to revision, not as settled foundations. Critical theory assumes an ontological position in which reality is shaped over time by structures such as social, political, cultural, economic, ethnic, and gender constructs – and the job of the researcher is to investigate those constructs, not simply assume them.

The role of reflexivity in problematising the object 🔗

Problematising the object of study is inseparable from researcher reflexivity – the practice of critically examining one’s own assumptions, biases, and social location as they bear on the research process. Reflexivity is a second-order questioning in the form of “why do I think what I think?” – it means not taking things for granted.

This matters because a researcher’s positionality can influence all aspects of the research process, including study design, research questions, data collection, and analysis. A researcher who does not examine how their own position shapes their definition of the object of study is not being more objective – they are simply being less transparent about the subjectivity that is already present. A critical social theory approach actively encourages individuals to question prevailing norms and examine how discourses in the social world construct people and institutions in particular ways.

Reflexivity, then, is not a confession of weakness in the research process. It is a methodological tool that strengthens it – making the assumptions embedded in the research object visible so they can be examined, challenged, and if necessary, revised.

Rethinking boundaries: interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches 🔗

One practical consequence of problematising the object of study is a push toward more interdisciplinary and intersectional research designs. When researchers stop treating society and culture as bounded, stable entities, they are forced to draw on multiple frameworks to capture complexity.

Research on gender, for instance, has been fundamentally transformed by questioning earlier binary definitions of the object. What was once studied as a two-category phenomenon – male and female behaviour – is now examined through frameworks that account for how gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, disability, and nationality. This shift did not happen because new data emerged that disproved the old model. It happened because researchers began asking harder questions about how the object of study had been defined in the first place.

Similarly, postcolonial scholarship has challenged the implicit assumption that Western social categories are universal. Postmodern critical theory politicises social problems by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, implicating researchers themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and relativising their findings. The object of study, from this perspective, always has a geography, a history, and a power structure embedded within it.

Why this matters for research quality 🔗

Problematising the object of study is not a philosophical detour – it has direct consequences for the validity and relevance of research findings. One of the most common deficiencies found in research papers is that the proposed methodology is not suitable to achieving the stated objective of your paper. Often, this mismatch originates not at the level of method selection but at the level of how the object was defined before methods were even considered.

When the object is defined too narrowly – for example, defining “community” in a way that excludes online or diaspora communities – the methodology will be calibrated to that narrow definition, and findings will be partial at best. When the object is defined using culturally specific assumptions presented as universal, the research reproduces those assumptions rather than examining them. Good social science research is done reflexively, with researchers actively accounting for how their choices shape what they find.

Raising these questions at the design stage – rather than treating the object of study as a neutral given – produces research that is more honest about its scope, more alert to what it might be missing, and more capable of generating insights that hold up across different contexts and perspectives. Social phenomena are not static. They are shaped by politics, history, economics, and contestation. Research that treats them as fixed will always lag behind the complexity it is trying to explain.

What do you think? In what ways might traditional definitions of “society” or “culture” in research you’ve encountered reflect the assumptions of a particular time, place, or social group? And how might researchers practically build critical scrutiny of their object of study into the earliest stages of designing a research project?

References

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