Problematizing the Object of Study in Social Sciences

Every research journey in the social sciences begins with a deceptively simple question: what exactly are we studying? Unlike a chemist examining a compound or a botanist classifying a plant, a social scientist studying “society,” “culture,” or “community” quickly runs into trouble. These objects are not sitting on a lab bench waiting to be observed. They are inferred, constructed, and constantly shifting. This is where the idea of problematizing the object of study becomes essential. It is the disciplined act of questioning what we take for granted before we start collecting data, drawing boundaries, or claiming conclusions.

What it means to problematize the object of study 🔗

To problematize something is to stop treating it as self-evident. In empirical social research, this means refusing to accept ready-made categories like “the poor,” “the middle class,” “rural India,” or “urban youth” without asking how those categories came to be, who defined them, and what they leave out. Scholars Mats Alvesson and Jörgen Sandberg have argued that problematization is a methodology for identifying and challenging the assumptions that underlie existing literature, so that researchers can formulate questions capable of producing more meaningful theories rather than simply filling small gaps left by previous studies.

This stands in contrast to what is often called “gap-spotting,” where a researcher scans the literature for a narrow unstudied corner and plants a flag there. Gap-spotting tends to reinforce existing theories rather than challenge them, producing incremental knowledge that rarely reshapes a field. Problematization asks us to do something harder: to interrogate the foundational ideas that structure our thinking in the first place.

Why social objects are harder to pin down 🔗

A natural scientist studying a mineral sample can, for the most part, treat it as separate from themselves. A social scientist does not have that luxury. When we study the family, education, or culture, we are part of these things because we live, think, and communicate within them. This is the classic subject-object problem. The researcher is both observer and participant, which means the very act of defining “society” or “community” is shaped by the researcher’s own location within it.

The trouble with “society” and “culture” as objects 🔗

Terms like society and culture feel solid until you try to measure them. Where does one culture end and another begin? Is a migrant worker in Bengaluru part of Karnataka’s culture, Bihar’s culture, or a new urban hybrid? Is “Indian society” one object or thousands? These are not pedantic questions. The answers determine who gets included in a sample, whose voices count as data, and whose experiences shape the conclusions.

Consider feminist research as an illustration. Early feminist studies often defined gender relations in binary terms, reinforcing the idea that these roles were fixed and easily categorized, while later scholars recognized gender as a spectrum shaped by historical, social, and political forces. The object of study itself was revised, and with it, the kinds of knowledge the research could produce. The same applies to caste, class, religion, and region in the subcontinent, where inherited categories from colonial census operations continue to shape contemporary social science in ways that often go unexamined.

Concepts are inferred, not observed 🔗

You cannot point at “society” the way you can point at a chair. Social concepts are abstractions built up from countless observations, conversations, documents, and assumptions. When a researcher says they are studying “the middle class,” they are drawing on income data, consumption patterns, self-identification, occupational categories, and cultural markers. Each of these is itself a construct. The object is layered with interpretation before any fieldwork begins.

This is why original knowledge cannot be a simple reading-off of the real, because it always presupposes a break with what we already know about the world. Useful research requires the researcher to pause and examine the conceptual scaffolding they have inherited.

Drawing boundaries around the unit of study 🔗

Every empirical study needs a defined unit of analysis. In social science research, the unit of analysis is the entity being studied as a whole, ranging from the state at the macro level to groups, organizations, and institutions at the meso level, and individuals at the micro level. Choosing the unit is one of the most consequential decisions a researcher makes, because it shapes everything that follows.

The challenge is that social phenomena rarely respect the boundaries we impose on them. A study of “village life” has to decide what counts as a village today, when residents commute to cities, send remittances from the Gulf, and participate in WhatsApp groups that link their diaspora across continents. A study of “workplace culture” has to grapple with remote work, gig platforms, and informal sector employment that makes the “workplace” itself porous.

Types of boundaries researchers must navigate 🔗

Researchers typically contend with several kinds of boundaries when conceptualizing their unit of study. Geographical boundaries are the most visible: a district, a panchayat, a neighborhood. But geography can mislead. A slum in Mumbai may have more in common with a slum in Delhi than with the wealthy colony next door. Cultural boundaries include language, religion, and shared practices, but these overlap and contradict each other in any real population. Social boundaries such as caste, class, gender, and generation cut across geography and culture. Temporal boundaries matter too, since a study of “youth” in 2010 is not studying the same population as “youth” in 2026, even if the age bracket is identical.

Within case study research specifically, case studies may examine individuals, groups, processes, events, decisions, programs, or other phenomena that are encased by temporal and spatial boundaries, and these boundaries place necessary restrictions on what data will be collected. Drawing boundaries too narrowly produces a trivial study; drawing them too broadly makes the research unmanageable and the conclusions shallow.

The reflexive turn: the researcher as part of the object 🔗

One of the most important shifts in social science methodology over the past few decades has been the recognition that researchers cannot stand outside what they study. Bourdieu argued that the social scientist is inherently laden with biases, and only by becoming reflexively aware of those biases can social scientists free themselves from them and aspire to objective science. Reflexivity, in this sense, is not a weakness to apologize for but a discipline to practice.

A researcher from an upper-caste, urban, English-educated background who studies a Dalit village in Jharkhand brings a set of assumptions that will shape what questions get asked, what answers get heard, and what gets written up. Acknowledging this is not about disqualifying the research. It is about being honest regarding the conditions under which the knowledge was produced. Reflexivity can be implemented through self-focused activities such as thinking about one’s own thinking, observing role boundaries and power dynamics in research relationships, and exploring perceptual experiences.

Reflexive modernity and the moving target 🔗

The problem is compounded by the fact that modern societies themselves are increasingly reflexive. Giddens has argued that in the post-modern age, technology and globalization have changed how people travel and communicate, exposing them to new ways of thinking and new perceptions that come from other cultures. People no longer passively occupy fixed roles; they monitor themselves, compare themselves to others through media, and revise their identities continuously. This means that the object of study is literally moving while the researcher tries to describe it.

Why fluid, context-sensitive approaches matter 🔗

Given all of this, rigid research designs that freeze the object of study at the start tend to produce brittle findings. A more defensible approach is to build flexibility into the research itself: treat the definition of the object as provisional, revisit it as fieldwork unfolds, and be transparent about how and why the boundaries shifted.

This is not a license for vagueness. Good research still requires clear concepts, replicable methods, and careful argument. But the clarity has to be earned through reflection rather than assumed from the start. A study of “farmer distress” in Maharashtra, for instance, needs to ask who counts as a farmer. Does it include landless agricultural laborers? Tenant cultivators? Farmers’ wives who do unpaid field work? Each choice implies a different study, a different sample, and different findings.

Practical implications for the researcher 🔗

For a student or early-career researcher, problematizing the object of study translates into a few practical habits. Start by listing your assumptions. Before framing a research question, write down what you already believe about the topic and where those beliefs come from. Interrogate inherited categories. If you are using census categories, administrative classifications, or popular labels, ask who created them and for what purpose. Map the boundaries explicitly. State clearly what is in and what is out of your study, and justify those choices. Stay open to revision. If the fieldwork reveals that your initial definition does not match reality, change the definition and document the change.

This approach sits well with what Alvesson and Sandberg describe, where the researcher engages in detailed observation and understanding of history, debates, and critiques of a given phenomenon, unpacking it sufficiently so that ordinary held assumptions can be scrutinized and reconsidered. The result is research that is harder to produce but far more useful when it lands.

The stakes for public administration and policy research 🔗

For anyone studying governance, administration, or public policy, these methodological questions are not abstract. Policies are designed for populations that have been defined in advance: “below poverty line households,” “scheduled tribes,” “informal sector workers,” “rural.” Each of these categories is a problematized object in waiting. Research that accepts them without scrutiny ends up reproducing the state’s way of seeing, which may or may not match how people actually live.

The most influential work in public administration research, whether on welfare delivery, decentralization, or bureaucratic behavior, tends to be work that rethinks the categories themselves. Studies that ask how “the citizen,” “the beneficiary,” or “the public” is constructed in practice often yield more actionable insights than studies that simply measure outcomes within pre-given boxes.

What do you think? How might the inherited categories in your own field of interest (say, “village,” “community,” or “citizen”) shape the conclusions that research in that field is able to reach? And where in your own thinking might a taken-for-granted assumption be quietly steering the questions you ask?

References

1. https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amr.2009.0188
2. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/isj.12316
3. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/society-politics-law/sociology/the-social-social-science/content-section-2.2
4. https://sociology.institute/research-methodologies-methods/rethinking-research-object-social-sciences/
5. https://www.anzam.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/5_Jorgen-Sandberg_Problematization.pdf
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_analysis
7. http://ijds.org/Volume16/IJDSv16p339-362Casteel7067.pdf
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory)
9. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14733250231173522
10. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/sociology/reflexivity-social-theory
11. https://medium.com/digital-public-square/problematization-as-a-methodology-to-think-about-taken-for-granted-truths-32eaed7a5246