Guía para elegir y declarar una postura epistemológica en investigación educativa

The purpose of this essay was to offer graduate students and early-career researchers in education a conceptual and practical guide for choosing and declaring, on sound grounds, the epistemological stance of their studies. The argument started from the classic framework of the ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions, to which the axiological question about the role of values was added. For each question, the main stances (postpositivism, constructivism, critical theory, critical realism, and pragmatism) were contrasted and illustrated with examples from educational research. The essay also examined how the subjective is objectified, the distinction between method and paradigm, the most common inconsistencies between stance and design, the debate over the order of the decision, and the possibility of combining paradigms, and it incorporated the transformative paradigm and the epistemologies of the South because of their relevance to the Latin American context. On this basis, a decision guide was proposed, grounded in the research question and in four verification criteria (evidence, participants, the researcher's own position, and feasibility), together with a model for writing the epistemological positioning statement. It was concluded that choosing a stance was neither a formality nor the adoption of a label but a reasoned decision, and that the quality of research depended on the coherence between its assumptions and its procedures, not on the superiority of any single method.