Last week I had the privilege of presenting at the 2026 South African Sociological Association (SASA) conference, as part of the Methodology & Social Theory Working Group, held at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa's Capital, Johannesburg. My presentation was entitled 'Crisis of Distance: Deconstructing SRT's Methodological Crisis and Finding the Dual Invisibility of Unpaid Child Labour in Homes'. That's a mouthful, so let me unpack what it actually means and why it matters for how we understand work, care and children in our homes.
The Theory in Question
Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) is an influential framework across disciplines. Its big contribution has been to insist that unpaid work done in homes ( cooking, cleaning, caring for others) is just as socially important as the paid work we do in offices and factories. This is a valuable insight and one that has shaped how many researchers think about gender, labour, and inequality.
But every theory has blind spots, and in my presentation I argued that SRT has a significant one: it has never developed a clear, grounded way of seen unpaid child labour happening inside homes. Not children playing, not children being cared for, but children actually doing unpaid work. My research asked: why has this been missed, and what would it take to fix it?
Approaches vs. Methodologies: Why the Difference Matters
Here's where the 'crisis' comes in. In my view, a lot of confusion in social science happens because researchers mix up two different things:
Research Approaches: the values and purposes that motivate a piece of research (for example, wanting to advance social justice, or centering particular ethical and political commitments).
Research Methodology: the actual scientific process of gathering, measuring, comparing, and testing evidence.
These aren't the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable can quietly shape what a theory is able to 'see'. If a theory's approach is built entirely around particular political or ethical priorities, it can end up systematically overlooking evidence that doesn't fit those priorities. Not because anyone intends to hide it, but because they never saw it.
Testing Three Proposed Fixes
Scholars have offered three different solutions to SRT's methodological crisis. In my presentation, I tested them:
- The Comparative Method: essentially the standard toolkit of science: collecting, measuring, comparing, and analysing data systematically.
- Research Approaches: pragmatic action and value-driven (axiological) commitments.
- A Dialectical Materialist Methodology (DMM): building theory that stays firmly anchored in empirical, real-world data.
Using the comparative method as my yardstick, because it's the closest thing we have to a neutral scientific standard, I tested the other two proposals against each other.
What I Found: A 'Dual Invisibility'
The results were revealing. When SRT leans on value- and pragmatic-driven political approaches rather than a genuine empirical methodology. It doesn't just fail to notice unpaid child labour in homes; it structurally can't. I call this the Dual Invisibility:
Social Invisibility: unpaid child labour disappears because the theory's feminist political commitments are oriented elsewhere (toward women's labour, in particular), so children doing unpaid work simply fall out of sight.
Safety Invisibility: because the theory's values focus on ideas like direct interpersonal 'care', it overlooks the real safety and wellbeing risks to children doing unsupervised, unpaid work in the home (echoing decades of 'latchkey children' research on the developmental and safety risks).
Put simply: SRT has drifted too far from the empirical ground: a genuine 'crisis of distance'.
The Way Forward
So what's the fix? Of the three proposed solutions, I found that the Dialectical Materialist Methodology (DMM) offers the strongest path forward, precisely because it insists on staying grounded in empirical data rather than starting and ending with a particular political commitment. A theory that wants to describe the real world, including uncomfortable, overlooked corners of it, has to keep checking itself against the evidence, not just its values.
This matters well beyond the seminar room. If our theories about work and care in the home have a structural blind spot around children's unpaid labour, then the policies and interventions built on those theories will have the same blind spot. Making unpaid child labour visible, both socially and in terms of safety, is a necessary first step toward addressing it properly.
It was a real pleasure to share this work with my colleagues in the Methodology & Social Theory Working Group at SASA 2026, and I'm looking forward to developing these ideas further in upcoming publications, including a dedicated piece on the methodology-versus-approach question itself.
Dr Anne H. Wiltshire is an independent sociologist and Director & Co-Founder of Cohere Solutions, specialising in social research methodology, evaluation, monitoring and social policy.