Two and a half minutes read
Is it necessary to prove ‘objectivity’ in reporting research? This is the elephant in social sciences and humanities higher education spaces that is seldom talked about!
From my student days I have been baffled by how to be ‘objective’ when what I write is something I chose to study and research precisely because I have a passion for it and a bias towards it!
There are areas of academic writing in particular like theological writing, and writing on social justice issues, where it is necessary to take sides while writing on certain topics. And I do not just mean that one takes sides only when writing about certain issue-based topics. When writing on methodological or technical tools in theological writing too, I believe it is necessary to exercise a bias in favour of, for example, certain hermeneutical methods or tools that could lend themselves more to certain types of theological inquiry.
In academic writing one is expected to have a reasonable handle on literature on similar and allied topics and one is expected to reference them in the course of one’s own writing. However, the choice to reference authors who could add strength to my argument cannot be adjudged a ‘subjective’ decision that discounts my writing altogether. It can be argued that I would lack integrity as an academic only if I refused to reference any other authors whose views were contrary to my own argument in an academic piece.
Having a clear position that is considered ‘subjective’ per se is therefore not the problem in academic writing. The problem is when one does not clearly outline this position as the location, stand point, and scope of one’s writing as you begin your piece. This is when you may be critiqued as being subjective when your reader assumed that you were supposedly setting out to cover a topic from varied angles whereas you set out confining yourself to pursue one line of inquiry based on a particular locus, but failed to spell out that this was your intent.
To understand more about the use of subjectivity in academic writing, you can read a well-researched study by Nunn, Brandt and Deveci that explores how ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ are deployed in written reports of scholarship and research here. The study makes an important conclusion that I quote below:
We conclude that, while ‘subjectivity’ is an inevitable part of any act of understanding, we question whether ‘objectivity’ is a useful or tenable guiding concept for authors to embrace when reporting a contribution to knowledge. We propose transparency in displaying and thereby acknowledging assumptions, agency and inevitable subjectivity as an integral part of reporting knowledge creation as a more tenable position.[1]
[1] Roger Nunn, Caroline Brandt, & Tanju Deveci. “Transparency, Subjectivity and Objectivity in Academic Texts” in English Scholarship Beyond Borders Vol. 4.1 (2018) 72-102.