A note on social ontology: for housing studies students

 A note on social ontology: for housing studies students

Highlight 6 main ideas of social ontology in the context of Housing Studies dissertation projects, and then, discuss briefly on the following research philosophies view the topic of social ontology: positivism, interpretivism, pragmatism and critical realism.

Social ontology concerns what kinds of social entities and realities exist, and how they produce outcomes. In Housing Studies, it helps a dissertation move beyond treating housing as merely a physical dwelling or market commodity, and instead analyse it as an institutional, relational, cultural, and political phenomenon.

Six main ideas

1.    Housing is socially constituted
A dwelling has material features, but its meaning as “home,” “investment,” “public housing,” “luxury,” or “inadequate housing” arises through laws, norms, markets, and lived experience. For example, the same flat may be a source of security to an owner, an investment asset to a landlord, and an overcrowded constraint to a tenant.

2.    Social structures are real and consequential
Institutions such as property-rights systems, mortgage markets, housing allocation rules, planning regimes, welfare policy, and landlord–tenant law shape housing opportunities and outcomes. They are not simply individual opinions; they organise and constrain action over time. Housing research using critical realism particularly emphasises property rights, savings and investment systems, labour, and welfare relations as arrangements that influence housing pathways.routledge

3.    Agency matters, but is enabled and constrained
Households, landlords, developers, planners, banks, and governments make choices. However, their choices occur within unequal constraints: income, tenure rules, interest rates, family obligations, discrimination, location, and access to credit. A good dissertation therefore avoids explaining affordability solely as “individual preference” or solely as “structure.”

4.    Housing reality is relational
Housing outcomes emerge from relationships among actors and systems: tenants and landlords, developers and financiers, households and the state, neighbourhoods and transport systems. Housing consumption is linked to the interconnected processes of promotion, finance, construction, management, and use.repository.tudelft

5.    Meanings and identities influence housing action
People do not make housing decisions on price alone. Ideas about family duty, status, security, privacy, home ownership, ageing, or belonging shape tenure preferences and residential choices. These meanings can differ by social class, generation, gender, migration experience, and local culture.

6.    Housing systems are historically contingent and changing
Current housing conditions reflect earlier policies, market institutions, and political decisions. Historical path dependence matters: a policy that initially promoted home ownership, for instance, can produce long-term effects on wealth inequality, intergenerational access, and attitudes towards renting. Critical-realist housing research examines the necessary and contingent conditions that combine to generate observed outcomes.repository.tudelft+1

Philosophical perspectives

Philosophy	Ontological view	Implication for a Housing Studies dissertation
Positivism	There is a single, objective social reality that exists independently of researchers and participants, and can be observed, measured, and tested. repository.up+1	Treats affordability, waiting time, house prices, overcrowding, tenure, or commuting distance as measurable variables. A study might test whether household income, age, or mortgage rates statistically predict home ownership.
Interpretivism	Social reality is multiple, subjective, and socially constructed through people’s meanings, interactions, and contexts. repository.up+1	Investigates how people understand housing. For example: “How do young adults in Hong Kong interpret home ownership, family support, and housing insecurity?” Interviews, observations, and thematic analysis fit well.
Pragmatism	Does not require commitment to one fixed account of reality; it accepts potentially differing ontological assumptions and prioritises the research problem and useful consequences of inquiry. repository.up+1	Suitable for practical, policy-oriented questions. A researcher could combine price and survey data with interviews to ask both how widespread rental stress is and how tenants experience and respond to it.
Critical realism	A real world exists independently of our knowledge, but it is layered, open, and shaped by often unobservable structures and causal mechanisms. Observable events do not reveal all causes. nsuworks.nova+1	Seeks explanation rather than only description or interpretation. For example, rising housing unaffordability may be studied through interacting mechanisms such as land policy, financialisation, credit conditions, welfare arrangements, developer power, and household strategies.

Key distinctions

Positivism asks: What measurable factors predict a housing outcome?
Interpretivism asks: What does housing mean to people, and how do they experience it?
Pragmatism asks: What combination of perspectives and methods best addresses the practical problem?
Critical realism asks: What underlying mechanisms and structural conditions generate the observed outcome, in this particular context?

Dissertation application

For an MBA or Housing Studies dissertation, choose ontology based on your explanatory ambition:

• Use positivism for variable-based studies, hypothesis testing, and generalisable associations.
• Use interpretivism when residents’, tenants’, homebuyers’, or policymakers’ meanings are central.
• Use pragmatism for mixed-methods research focused on producing actionable recommendations.
• Use critical realism when you want to explain why a housing outcome occurs through the interaction of individual agency, institutions, history, and market structures—especially useful for policy and comparative housing research. Critical realism is advocated in housing research because housing phenomena are complex, open, and structured rather than reducible to simple event-outcome relationships.routledge+1

A concise ontology statement for a critical-realist housing dissertation could be:

This study adopts a critical-realist social ontology, viewing housing affordability as a real but socially produced outcome. It is generated through the contingent interaction of household agency with deeper institutional, economic, and policy structures, some of which may not be directly observable.

Two useful references for a dissertation discussion of social ontology—one foundational and one directly applied to Housing Studies—are:

·        Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. (1966) The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. This foundational text supports an interpretivist or social-constructionist account of housing meanings, norms, and institutions.cmc.marmot+1

·        Lawson, J. (2006) Critical realism and housing research. London and New York: Routledge. This is especially relevant to Housing Studies because it develops a critical-realist ontological approach to explaining housing systems and comparative housing outcomes.taylorfrancis+1

In-text citations would be: (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) and (Lawson, 2006).