Includes bibliographical references (pages 327-355) and index.
Contents:
Concluding comments / Paul K. Edwards, Steve Vincent, and Joe O'Mahoney. Critical realism, research techniques, and research designs / Stephen Ackroyd and Jan Ch. Karlsson -- Employing a form of critical realist discourse analysis for identity research : an example from women's talk fo motherhood, childcare, and employment / Wendy Sims-Schouten and Sarah Riley -- Researching identity : a critical realist approach / Abigail Marks and Joe O'Mahoney -- Critical realism and grounded theory / Steve Kempster and Ken Parry -- Critical realism and interviewing subjects / Chris Smith and Tony Elger -- Critical realism and ethnography / Chris Rees and Mark Gatenby -- Critical realism and the organizational case study : a guide to discovering institutional mechanisms / Steve Vincent and Robert Wapshott -- Comparing cases / Ian Kessler and Stephen Bach -- Critical realism and international comparative case research / Ayse Saka-Helmhout -- Pulling the levers of agency : implementing critical realist action research / Monder Ram, Paul K. Edwards, Trevor Jones, Alex Kiselinchev, and Lovemore Muchenje -- History and documents in critical realism / Alistair Mutch -- Critical realism and mixed methods research : combining the extensive and intensive at multiple levels / Scott A. Hurrell -- Realist synthesis / Joanne Greenhalgh -- Probability and models / Malcolm Williams -- An appraisal of the contribution of critical realism to qualitative and quantitative research methodology : is dialectics the way forward? / Andrew Brown and John Michael Roberts -- Concluding comments / Paul K. Edwards, Steve Vincent, and Joe O'Mahoney.
Summary:
This book aims to fill a significant gap in the literature by providing a practical guide to the application of Critical Realism (CR) in empirical research projects. It explores the methodological consequences of committing to a CR ontology, the assumptions that researchers from this tradition make about the nature of reality. These assumptions are important because ontological commitments, which relate what we believe exists, often affect our epistemological concerns, which relate to our beliefs about how whatever exists can be studied and known. Thus, for a researcher, ontology and epistemology are important because they have consequences for the possibilities and limits of the research methods, techniques, and analyses that they employ. The book explains what CR is and outlines the logic of research design. In a series of chapters on major social science research methods, purpose-written by experts in the relevant technique, the book contains extended illustration of how to conduct inquiry using CR.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.