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The Value of Critical Realism for Qualitative Research
Joseph A Maxwell and Kavita Mittapalli
I.
Realism as a stance for qualitative research
Various forms of realism have had a significant influence on the
philosophy and methodology of the social sciences (e.g., Cook & Campbell,
1979; Manicas, 1987, 2006; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999;
Campbell, 1988; Bhaskar, 1989; House, 1991; Shweder, 1991). The most
detailed explorations of the implications of realism for research methods are
in the work of scholars in the critical realist tradition, particularly Sayer
(1992, 2000), and Pawson & Tilley (1997). However, very few authors have
specifically addressed the implications of realism for qualitative research. In
this paper, we argue that contemporary philosophic realism, particularly
“critical realism” as developed by Harre, Bhaskar, Sayer, and others,
provides a coherent and productive stance for conducting qualitative
research.
There has been a proliferation of realist positions in philosophy and the
social sciences since the 1970s, so much so that one realist philosopher
claimed that "scientific realism is a majority position whose advocates are so
divided as to appear a minority" (Leplin 1984:1). A key feature of most of
these versions of realism is that they deny that we can attain a single,
"correct" understanding of the world, what Putnam calls the "God's eye
view". They agree that all theories about the world are grounded in a
particular perspective and world view, and that all knowledge is partial,
incomplete, and fallible. This position combines ontological realism with
epistemological constructivism or relativism (Sayer, 2000, p. 47).
Lakoff states this distinction between "objectivist" and "realist" views
as follows:
Scientific objectivism claims that there is only one fully correct way in
which reality can be divided up into objects, properties, and relations.
. . . Scientific realism, on the other hand, assumes that "the world is
the way it is," while acknowledging that there can be more than one
scientifically correct way of understanding reality in terms of
conceptual schemes with different objects and categories of objects.
(1987:265)
Terms used for such versions of realism include "critical" realism (Cook &
Campbell 1979; Bhaskar 1989), "experiential" realism (Lakoff, 1987),
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"constructive" realism (Howard 1991), "artful" realism (Shweder, 1991),
"subtle" realism (Hammersley, 1992), “emergent” realism (Henry, Julnes, &
Mark, 1998; Mark, Henry, & Julnes, 2000), "natural" realism (Putnam,
1999), and “innocent” realism (Haack, 1998, 2003).
A second key feature of the forms of realism that we employ here is
that they accept the validity of the concept of "cause" in scientific
explanation, a concept that was one of the main targets of both positivism
and its antipositivist critics. Positivists either rejected causality as a
metaphysical notion that should have no role in science, or reduced it to the
Humean concept of the “constant conjunction” of events, denying that there
was any meaning to the concept other than this association. The latter
conception of causality, which is most clearly presented in the work of Carl
Hempel, involves comparison of situations in which the presumed cause
occurred with those in which it did not, with the goal of finding regularities
(Hume’s “constant conjunctions”) that apply to general categories of events
and phenomena. This view treats the actual process of causality as
unobservable, a “black box”, and focuses on establishing laws that express
the relationship between inputs and outputs (Maxwell 2004a, 2004b). This
approach to causation has survived the collapse of logical positivism, and is
dominant in current quantitative research in the social sciences.
Realists, in contrast, see causality as referring to the actual
mechanisms that are involved in particular events and situations. Salmon
(1984; 1998) has developed a particularly detailed analysis of this view of
causation, one that gives primary importance to causal processes. Pawson
and Tilley (1997), in their realist approach to program evaluation, state that
“Realism’s key feature is its stress on the mechanics of explanation” (p. 55)
and that
When realists say that the constant conjunction view of one event
producing another is inadequate, they are not attempting to bring
further “intervening” variables into the picture . . . The idea is that the
mechanism is responsible for the relationship itself. A mechanism is .
. . not a variable but an account of the makeup, behaviour and
interrelationship of those processes which are responsible for the
regularity. (pp. 67-68)
In addition, they maintain that “the relationship between causal mechanisms
and their effects is not fixed, but contingent” (p. 69); it is intrinsically
dependent on the context within which the mechanism operates. For the
social sciences, the social and cultural contexts of the phenomenon studied
are crucial for understanding the operation of causal mechanisms.
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Finally, the realists discussed here who have directly addressed the
social sciences hold that mental concepts refer to real entities, and that
these entities are causally relevant to explanations of individual and social
phenomena. Emotions, beliefs, values, and so on are part of reality; they
are not simply abstractions from behavior or epiphenomena of brain states.
Realism in this sense is therefore not identical with materialism, nor is it
simply a cover for a reductionist agenda that would attempt to eliminate
such concepts from scientific discourse (Putnam, 1999, p 74 ff.).
The incorporation of such an interpretive element in realist social
science is widely recognized (e.g., Sayer 2000, pp. 17-18), but a
philosophical grounding for this has been developed most clearly by the
philosopher Hilary Putnam, who argues for the legitimacy of both mental and
physical ways of making sense of the world (1990, 1999). This point is often
misunderstood or missed, because realism is often seen as the doctrine that
“the world is independent of the mental” (Callinicos, 1995, p. 82). The
versions of realism that we employ here treat mental phenomena as part of
reality, not as a realm separate from it.
We argue that the realist positions described above are quite
compatible with the way most qualitative researchers think about their work,
and incorporates the key characteristics of qualitative research. First, they
recognize the reality and importance of meaning, as well as of physical and
behavioral phenomena, as having explanatory relevance, and acknowledge
the essentially interpretive nature of our understanding of the former.
Second, they emphasize the importance of the context of the phenomena
studied, rather than seeking only a general understanding independent of
specific conditions. Third, they support the importance of investigating the
processes by which an event or situation occurs, rather than simply
attempting to demonstrate an association between variables.
II.
The treatment of realism in qualitative research
Given the prominence of realist views in philosophy, it is puzzling that,
with the partial exception of the field of program evaluation, realism has not
had a more explicit influence on qualitative research. Despite the advocacy
of a realist approach to qualitative research by Miles and Huberman (1994,
Huberman & Miles, 1985) and Hammersley (1992), critical realism has been
largely unnoticed by most qualitative researchers. When it has been noticed,
it has generally dismissed as simply positivism in another guise (Mark,
Henry, & Julnes, 2000, p. 166).
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The earliest explicit attention to realism in qualitative research was a
paper by Huberman and Miles, “Assessing Local Causality in Qualitative
Research” (1985). In this paper, they sought to justify the determination of
causal influence using qualitative research, and discussed the analytic
strategies that qualitative researchers can use to accomplish this. Their
paper was in many ways a philosophical addendum to their book “Qualitative
Data Analysis” (1984, 1994), which provided a detailed presentation of
qualitative analysis that was grounded in a realist perspective. However,
despite its clear presentation of a realist conception of causality, the paper
actually advocated a “middle ground” between realism (which they equated
with “neo-positivism”) and idealism, and their focus was almost entirely on
realism’s implications for causal analysis. In their book “Qualitative Data
Analysis”, in contrast, the specific discussions of analysis were not explicitly
connected to realist issues, and indeed it was only in the second edition of
the book that the word “realism” appeared at all.
Similarly, the second edition of Robson’s textbook “Real World
Research” (2002) was also explicitly realist in its approach, and devoted a
substantial amount of space to qualitative methods. However, the
discussion of realism was largely confined to the introductory chapters, and
the specific discussions of design and methods were only implicitly realist.
There are only two authors that we are aware of that have provided an
explicit and general discussion of the implications of realism for qualitative
research generally. One is Hammersley, whose book “What’s Wrong with
Ethnography” (1992) contained a chapter on “Ethnography and Realism”.
Hammersley argued that there is a strong realist strand within the
ethnographic tradition: the view that ethnography provides a deeper and
more accurate account of the beliefs and behavior of those studied than any
other method. However, this is in conflict with an equally strong relativist
strand in ethnography, holding that an ethnographic account is merely the
construction of the researcher, and is no more or less true than other
accounts. Hammersley rejected both the simplistic realist and the consistent
relativist solutions to this conflict, arguing for a “subtle” realism that
recognizes that all observation is theory-laden, while retaining the idea of a
real world which our observation makes claims about, a world that includes
the beliefs and perspectives of those studied.
The other author is one of the authors of the present paper (Maxwell),
who has written several papers applying a realist perspective to various
aspects of qualitative research. These include “Understanding and Validity in
Qualitative Research” (1992), “Realism and the Role of the Researcher in
Qualitative Psychology (2002), and “Using Qualitative Methods for Causal
Explanation” (2004b).
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Despite the limited attention that has been given to the implications of
realism for qualitative research, some authors have explicitly challenged this
position. Denzin and Lincoln, in their introduction to the third edition of The
SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (2005), discussed critical realism as
a possible “third stance” distinct from both naïve positivism and
poststructuralism. However, they ended up rejecting most of what critical
realists advocate, and stated that “we do not think that critical realism will
keep the social science ship afloat” (p. 13).
Realism was also challenged by Smith and Deemer (2000), who
devoted particular attention to refuting Hammersley’s and Maxwell’s
arguments for the value of realism. They argued that the ontological
concept of a reality independent of our theories serves no useful function in
qualitative research, since there is no way to employ this that will avoid the
constraints of a relativist epistemology, which rejects the possibility of
objective knowledge of the world and accepts the existence of multiple
legitimate accounts and interpretations. They concluded that “Maxwell is
unable to show us how to get reality to do some serious work” (p. 883).
In what follows, we want to specifically challenge Smith and Deemer’s
claim that the concept of reality does no useful work in qualitative research.
We believe that realism can do useful work in qualitative methodology and
practice. So rather than take the space to rebut their philosophical
arguments, we want to describe some of the contributions that we believe
realism can make to qualitative research.
III. The work that realism can do in qualitative research:
There are two main sorts of work that realism can do in qualitative
research. First, realism can be used to defend qualitative research from the
currently-widespread criticisms of other researchers, and to support the
legitimacy and relevance of the key goals of qualitative research. These
goals include the understanding of social actors’ perspectives and meanings
as real phenomena which are fundamental to social science; employing a
process-oriented, rather than variable-oriented, approach to explanation,
one that emphasizes the importance of context for explanation; and finally,
seeking the explanation of singular events and situations through case
studies, rather than requiring that explanation be based on regularities or
“general laws” (Maxwell, 2004a). Second, realism provides an alternative to
the constructivist views that are now dominant in qualitative research, and
can help to resolve some issues that are not well handled within a
constructivist framework. In what follows, we will discuss what we see as the
most important of these issues.
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1.
Incorporating causal explanation into qualitative research
Most qualitative researchers reject the legitimacy of explicitly causal
explanation in qualitative research, or even more broadly, in the social
sciences. A particularly influential statement of this position was by Lincoln and Guba
(1985), who argued that “the concept of causality is so beleaguered and in such serious
disarray that it strains credibility to continue to entertain it in any form approximating its
present (poorly defined) one” (p. 141). They proposed replacing it with “mutual
simultaneous shaping,” which they defined as
Everything influences everything else, in the here and now. Many elements are
implicated in any given action, and each element interacts with all of the others in
ways that change them all while simultaneously resulting in something that we,
as outside observers, label as outcomes or effects. But the interaction has no
directionality, no need to produce that particular outcome. (p. 151)
Guba and Lincoln (1989) later grounded this view in a constructivist
stance, stating that “there exist multiple, socially constructed realities
ungoverned by natural laws, causal or otherwise” (p. 86), and that “‘causes’
and ‘effects’ do not exist except by imputation” (p. 44).
A major reason for this rejection has been the dominance of a Humean
or “regularity” theory of causality in the social sciences, which sees causality
as simply a matter of regularities in the relationships between events. This
theory inherently denies that qualitative research can demonstrate causal
relationships, and relegates it to the role of providing preliminary insights or
supplementary support to “causal” quantitative methods.
A realist understanding of causality removes all of these strictures on
using qualitative research to develop and test causal explanations (Maxwell,
2004a, b). Seeing causality as a matter of processes and mechanisms,
rather than regularities, implies that some causal processes can be directly
observed, rather than only inferred from measured covariation of the
presumed causes and effects. This reinforces the importance placed by many
qualitative researchers on directly observing and interpreting social and
psychological processes.
This focus on the direct observation of causal processes, rather than
on correlating independent and dependent variables, allows qualitative
researchers to identify causality even in individual cases, without any
comparison or control group (Salmon, 1998, pp. 15-16; Putnam, 1999, pp.
40-41; Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002, p. 465), something that the
regularity theory of causation denies is possible. The ability of qualitative
methods to directly investigate causal processes, even in single cases, is a
major contribution that this approach can make to scientific inquiry.
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Second, realism’s insistence on the inherently contextual nature of
causal explanation (Sayer, 1992, pp. 60-61; 2000, pp. 114-118; Huberman
and Miles, 1985; Pawson and Tilley, 1997) supports qualitative researchers’
emphasis on the importance of context in understanding social phenomena.
This is not simply a claim that causal relationships vary across contexts; it is
a more fundamental claim, that the context within which a causal process
occurs is intrinsically involved in that process, and often cannot be
“controlled for” in a variance-theory sense without misrepresenting the
causal mechanisms involved (Blumer, 1956). These mechanisms are seen
not as universal laws, but as situationally contingent; they are inherently
involved with their actual context, and may or may not produce regularities.
Thus, causality is inherently local rather than general, and general causal
claims must be based on valid site-specific causal explanations (Miles and
Huberman, 1994).
Third, in claiming that causal explanation does not inherently depend
on preestablished comparisons, it legitimizes qualitative researchers’ use of
flexible and inductive designs and methods.
However, the development of qualitative methods for investigating
causality has been obstructed by the dominant Humean conception of
causality, and despite the pathbreaking work of Miles and Huberman (1994),
there is much that needs to be done to make such methods more explicit
and systematic. A realist perspective can help both to establish the
legitimacy of this enterprise, and to provide philosophical guidance in
improving and assessing these methods.
2.
Seeing mind as part of reality
As described above, most realists who have directly addressed the
social sciences hold that mental concepts refer to real entities, and that
these entities are causally relevant to explanations of individual and social
phenomena. For example, Sayer states that “social phenomena are conceptdependent . . . What the practices, institutions, rules, roles, or relationships
are depends on what they mean in society to its members.” (1992, p. 30)
Emotions, beliefs, values, and so on are part of reality; they are not simply
abstractions from behavior or constructions of the observer.
However, realists are not dualists, postulating two different realms of
reality, the physical and the mental. Putnam (1990, 1999) argued for the
legitimacy of both “mental” and “physical” ways of making sense of the
world. He advocated a distinction between mental and physical perspectives
or languages, both referring to reality, but from different conceptual
standpoints. He argued that “The metaphysical realignment I propose
involves an acquiescence in a plurality of conceptual resources, of different
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and mutually irreducible vocabularies . . .coupled with a return not to
dualism but to the ‘naturalism of the common man.’” (1999, p. 38) This
analysis supports the incorporation of an interpretive element in realist social
science, a view that is widely accepted by critical realists (e.g., Sayer, 2000,
pp. 17-18).
Combining this view with a process-oriented approach to causality can
resolve the long-standing perceived contradiction between “reason”
explanations and “cause” explanations, and integrate both in explanatory
theories. Weber's sharp distinction between causal explanation and
interpretive understanding (Layton, 1997, pp. 184-185; MacIntyre, 1967)
obscured the importance of reasons as causal influences on actions, and
thus their role as essential components of any full explanation of human
action. Realism can deal with the apparent dissimilarity of reason
explanations and cause explanations by showing that reasons can plausibly
be seen as real events in a causal nexus leading to the action.
The realist argument that mental events and processes are real
phenomena that can be causes of behavior, rather than simply abstractions
from behavior or constructions of the observer, supports the fundamental
role that qualitative researchers assign to meaning and intention in
explaining social phenomena, and the essentially interpretive nature of our
understanding of these (Blumer 1956; Maxwell 1999). This view of reasons
as causes is fundamental to our common-sense explanations of people’s
actions, and has been asserted by many philosophers and social scientists
other than avowed realists. However, realism gives this position a consistent
grounding, without assuming a forced choice between a naïve realism and
interpretivism or constructivism. This point is often misunderstood or
missed, because there is a widespread view that realism is the doctrine that
“the world is independent of the mental” (Callinicos, 1995, p. 82). The
versions of realism that we discuss here treat mental phenomena as part of
reality, not as a realm separate from it.
3.
Clarifying the relationship between actors’ perspectives and their
actual situations
Realism also supports the converse of the previous argument, the idea
that actors' social and physical contexts have a causal influence on their
beliefs and perspectives. Constructivists have tended to deny such
influences, while positivism and some forms of post-positivist empiricism
tend to simply dismiss the reality or importance of actors’ perspectives, or to
“operationalize” these to behavioral variables. From a realist perspective, not
only are both actors’ perspectives and their situations real phenomena, they
are separate phenomena that causally interact with one another. In making
this claim, realism supports the emphasis that critical theory places on the
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influence that social and economic conditions have on beliefs and ideologies.
However, it does this without assuming any particular theory of this
relationship, such as Marxism.
Such a view has long been advanced by some social theorists and
researchers (e.g., Menzel, 1978). These views have often been based on a
commonsense realism about the causes of behavior, a realism that is implicit
in our everyday explanations of people’s behavior (Davidson, 1997). An
explicit realist stance provides philosophical support for this commonsense
view, and also for holding in abeyance any exclusive commitment to specific
mechanisms, regularities, or outcomes of such interaction.
4.
Understanding diversity as a real phenomenon
Realism can highlight the importance of diversity and heterogeneity as
a real phenomenon, rather than simply “noise” that obscures general truths,
and can promote the exploration of the actual consequences of diversity.
Both qualitative and quantitative research have tendencies, both theoretical
and methodological, to ignore or suppress diversity in their goal of seeking
general accounts, though in different ways (Maxwell, 1995). Quantitative
research often aggregates data across individuals and settings, and ignores
individual and group diversity that cannot be subsumed into a general
explanation. Because of its emphasis on general descriptions and
explanations, it tends to impose or generate wide-ranging but simplistic
theories that do not take account of particular contextual influences, diverse
meanings, and unique phenomena.
However, qualitative researchers also tend to neglect diversity.
Theoretically, this is often the result of social theories that emphasize
uniformity; such theories include the concept of culture as necessarily
shared (Maxwell, 1999), and “consensus” approaches to community and
social order (Maxwell, 1995). Methodologically, the sample size and
sampling strategies used in qualitative studies are often inadequate to fully
identify and characterize the actual diversity that exists in the setting or
population studied, and can lead to simplistic generalizations or the
assumption of greater uniformity or agreement than actually exists.
Realism provides one way to overcome the theoretical and
methodological characteristics that lead to the neglect of diversity.
Qualitative methods and approaches, which focus on particular phenomena
and processes and their unique contexts, can help to overcome the biases
inherent in universalizing, variable-oriented quantitative methods.
Conversely, realism emphasizes the need to pay systematic attention to the
existence and nature of diversity, and can sensitize qualitative researchers
to the existence of diversity as a real property of social and cultural systems.
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It can thus help to correct the tendency for qualitative researchers to ignore
complexity and focus only on typical characteristics and shared concepts and
themes.
Realism can therefore perform a great deal of useful work in
qualitative research, both in legitimizing what qualitative researchers already
do, and in influencing them to critically examine and improve their current
methods. Ontological realism, when integrated with epistemological
constructivism, is not only a more accurate understanding of our relationship
to the world, but is of direct practical benefit to qualitative researchers.
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