Understanding Social Reality: Objectivist vs. Subjectivist Views in Educational Research

Picture two researchers walking into the same government school on the same morning. One carries a clipboard with a structured questionnaire and plans to measure attendance, test scores, and teacher-pupil ratios. The other carries a notebook and plans to spend weeks sitting quietly in the back of classrooms, talking to students during recess, and observing how children actually experience school life. Both are studying “dropout rates,” yet they will produce very different kinds of knowledge. This difference doesn’t come from one researcher being smarter or more rigorous than the other. It comes from a deeper, often unspoken assumption about what social reality actually is. In educational research, this assumption is called an ontological position, and it splits broadly into two camps: objectivism and subjectivism.

What social reality means in research 🔗

Before comparing the two views, it helps to define the term itself. Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being and existence. When applied to research, it asks a very practical question: do social phenomena, such as classroom culture, motivation, or discipline, exist independently of the people experiencing them, or are they produced by the very people involved? Research methods scholars describe ontology as being made up of exactly these two competing positions, and every study, whether it knows it or not, takes a side.

This choice is not just academic housekeeping. It shapes what counts as valid data, which questions get asked, and which research tools get picked up. A researcher who believes reality is fixed and external will reach for surveys and statistics. A researcher who believes reality is built through human interpretation will reach for interviews and field notes. Understanding both positions is the first step to reading educational research critically, and to designing a study of your own with intention rather than by accident.

The objectivist view: one reality, waiting to be measured 🔗

Objectivism holds that social entities, such as schools, exam systems, or student achievement, exist “out there” independently of any individual’s perception of them. In this view, a dropout rate, a literacy percentage, or a teacher’s years of experience are facts of the world in much the same way that temperature or rainfall are facts of the physical world. They can be measured, recorded, and verified regardless of who is doing the measuring.

This position assumes what philosophers call a realist ontology: a reality exists whether or not anyone is conscious of it, and the task of research is to accumulate careful, repeatable observations of that reality. The researcher’s job is to stay detached and neutral, almost like a scientist studying a chemical reaction, so that personal opinions do not contaminate the findings.

Core assumptions behind objectivism 🔗

Three ideas anchor the objectivist position:

Single, shared reality: There is one true version of events, and all observers, if they measure correctly, should arrive at the same conclusion.

Researcher detachment: The person conducting the study stands outside the phenomenon being studied, observing without influencing it.

Cumulative, generalisable knowledge: Findings from one school or district should, in theory, apply to other similar settings, because the underlying reality does not change from place to place.

What objectivism looks like in practice 🔗

Consider a study measuring whether a new teaching method improves mathematics scores across 50 schools. An objectivist researcher would rely on standardised test results, attendance registers, and demographic data. The starting assumption is that “mathematics ability” is a real, measurable quantity that exists independently of how any single student or teacher feels about it that day. This tradition traces back to the idea that social entities and their meanings have an existence independent of the social actors involved with them, a foundational assumption of positivist social science.

The subjectivist view: reality as something we build together 🔗

Subjectivism takes the opposite starting point. It argues that social phenomena do not exist as fixed facts waiting to be discovered. Instead, they are created, moment by moment, through the perceptions, interpretations, and interactions of the people involved. A “good school” or a “disruptive student” is not an objective category; it is a label that emerges from shared meanings, cultural context, and ongoing social negotiation.

Under this view, reality is not singular but plural and dynamic. Two teachers in the same staffroom can genuinely experience the “same” policy change in completely different ways, and neither experience is more real than the other. Subjectivism therefore treats social reality as something that is continuously produced through the actions and perceptions of the people who live within it, rather than something waiting passively to be measured.

Core assumptions behind subjectivism 🔗

Multiple realities: Different individuals or groups can hold equally valid but different understandings of the same event.

Researcher involvement: The researcher cannot stand fully outside the phenomenon; their presence and interpretation shape what is understood.

Context-bound knowledge: Findings are tied to a specific time, place, and group of people, and are not automatically transferable elsewhere.

What subjectivism looks like in practice 🔗

Now imagine a researcher studying the same dropout problem, but asking why particular students leave a particular school. Instead of running numbers, they spend months in the community, sitting with families, listening to how students describe their own decisions, and noticing unspoken norms around gender, caste, or economic pressure. A well-known example of this approach in the Indian context comes from academic modules that use seminal ethnographic studies of Indian schools and villages to teach students how meaning is constructed inside everyday classroom life. The resulting knowledge is rich and deeply contextual, but it makes no claim to represent every school in the country.

Why this philosophical choice shapes the entire research design 🔗

The objectivist-subjectivist divide is not just a classroom debate; it has direct, practical consequences for how a study is designed, conducted, and judged. Once a researcher settles on an ontological position, the choice of methodology tends to follow almost automatically.

Objectivists and the experimental method 🔗

Because objectivists believe in a single, measurable reality, they favour methods borrowed from the natural sciences: controlled experiments, structured surveys, and statistical analysis. Positivist methodology relies heavily on experimentation, with hypotheses framed as testable, causal statements about the relationship between variables. In an education context, this might mean randomly assigning students to two teaching approaches and comparing test outcomes, treating “learning” as something that can be isolated, controlled, and measured with precision.

Subjectivists and the ethnographic method 🔗

Subjectivists, by contrast, reach for approaches that preserve context, voice, and nuance. Ethnography, which gathers observations, interviews, and documentary material to build detailed accounts of social settings, is a classic tool for this purpose. Rather than reducing a classroom to a set of scores, an ethnographer tries to understand how students, teachers, and parents make sense of schooling from the inside. This kind of research does not aim to prove a hypothesis; it aims to describe and interpret a lived reality as fully as possible.

Two traditions, two different goals 🔗

It helps to remember that these are not simply “better” or “worse” ways of doing research; they answer different kinds of questions. As education researchers have noted while tracing this shift, positivist and interpretivist paradigms differ fundamentally in how they define valid knowledge, which shapes the choice between quantitative and qualitative methods in a given study. If the goal is to compare outcomes across a large, diverse population, objectivist tools built on standard measures tend to work better. If the goal is to understand why something is happening within a specific community, subjectivist tools built on close observation tend to work better.

Can the two views work together? 🔗

Increasingly, researchers argue that education is complex enough to need both lenses. A comparison of positivist and interpretivist assumptions, laid out in academic teaching resources, shows how the two paradigms diverge sharply on whether reality is objectively accessible or subjectively experienced, right down to the researcher’s expected level of detachment. Recognising this divergence has pushed many educational researchers toward mixed-methods designs: pairing standardised test data with interviews, or combining dropout statistics with case studies of individual students. The two traditions are not necessarily rivals; they can be complementary lenses that reveal different layers of the same educational reality.

For a student of educational research, the real value of learning this distinction is not picking a “correct” side. It is developing the habit of asking, before designing any study: what am I assuming about the nature of the reality I am trying to study, and does my chosen method actually match that assumption?

What do you think? When you think about your own school experience, does it feel more like a fixed set of facts that anyone could measure, or a reality that felt different depending on who you asked? And if you were designing a study on student motivation, would you lean toward measurable data or lived experience, and why?

References

1. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/researchmethodsandethics/chapter/1-4-understanding-key-research-concepts-and-terms/
2. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1054&context=books
3. https://research-methodology.net/research-philosophy/ontology/
4. https://aud.delhi.gov.in/education-and-school-ethnography-qualitative-research-methods-elective-basket-ecce
5. https://files.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/17937/files/2022/01/Rehman-Alharthi-2016.pdf
6. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/0142159X.2013.804977
7. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED619359
8. https://open.library.okstate.edu/gognresearchmethods/chapter/interpretivism/