Realism and Social Science

“According to realism, reality is objective and independent from human knowledge but can be evidenced through observable patterns of events or outcomes that materialize only when social ingredients combine under the right contextual circumstances (Sayer, 2000).”

“What counts as a structure, what the powers and limitations of various structures are, and how structures interact with one another are all subjects of debate (see, inter alia, Eisenstein, 1978; Hall et al., 1978; Walby, 1991; Robinson, 2000 [1983]; Sayer, 2000; Fraser, 2018).”

“through ‘retroduction’: going back from observed patterns and looking below the surface for what might have produced them [28, 29].”

“In addition, the structures may mutually depend on other subsystems at different levels because of the open and complex character of the social realm (e.g. Danermark et al. 2002; Sayer 2000).”

“It connects structures with the enactment of power, recognizing that there is a choice not to exercise power and therefore there is the capacity to change outcomes by understanding the variable factors and causal groups or networks (Sayer 1999).”

“The analysis followed what Sayer (2000) described as an intensive research approach: Focusing on how causal processes work in a limited number of cases, and understanding the action of individual agents within those causal contexts.”

“…lessons from the past or contemporary models, counterfactual reasoning about the possible effects of a changing context, elaboration of the causal relationships between different events, and thought experiments about the consequences of changing practices and systems (Patom¨aki, 2006; Sayer, 2000).”

“Eliciting knowledge on the local causation of actions is one of the main objectives of explanatory qualitative research (Huberman and Miles, 1985: 143-148; Sayer, 2000: 114-118; Scapens, 1992; Maxwell, 2004).”

“Sayer (2000) illustrates this idea by highlighting that ‘social phenomena are emergent from biological phenomena, which are emergent from chemical and physical strata’ (13).”

“Inspired by a call for sociology to be normatively engaged in people’s everyday worlds (Sayer, 2000), this article is primarily a normative intervention in the Western debate about women, religion and secularism.”

“…assessing their average effects, based on an understanding of the social world as an open system where latent causal mechanisms (M) are activated by particular contexts (C) and interact with one another in complex ways to generate new phenomena, including positive and negative outcomes (O) [47–49].”

“Knowledge can still be differentially closer or farther from the truth, however, because truth is alethic – ‘[a] proposition is true if and only if the state of affairs that it expresses (describes) is real’ (Alston 1996; Bhaskar 1975; 249; see also Sayer 2000; Smith 2011, 207–19).”

“…the key challenges of social science to explain such patterns in human behaviour and its spatial character, through abstract mechanisms – theoretical statements that summarise or capture relationships between entities in the social world, and explain how they generate ‘real ’ effects (Sayer, 2000).”

“The theoretical framework for this study was critical realism, where it is believed that the social world is comprised of four modes of reality: material, ideal, artefactual and social and it is this unique feature in which multiple modes of reality exist for all phenomenon under investigation (Sayer, 2000).”

“The keys are to recognise that (a) social systems are open systems, and theories that assume closure of the global should be avoided (Sayer 2000); (b) meanings change over time as the world changes; and (c) higher education is engaged in multiple geographical scales (national, regional, global,…”

“Following Gong and Hassink (2020), theory-building in economic geography in a critical–realist perspective (Sayer, 1992, 2000) attempts to achieve abstraction from context, or what Bathelt and Glückler (2003, p. 128) call ‘de-contextualization’, through repeated retheorizing that makes concepts…”

“Firstly, their role in determining behaviour and choice is often entangled in arguments that focus not on trade-offs per se, but on the relative merits of intensive versus extensive methodologies (Sayer 2000) and on the epistemological claims they reflect.”

“Instead, intensive approaches aim at an in-depth understanding of social and mental phenomena (Sayer, 2000 20e22).”

“As a central premise, we follow the argument of critical theorists that research should question and challenge conditions perceived to be hegemonic in a quest for social change (e.g. Cox and Sinclair 1996; Sayer 2000).”

“Or it might be indirect, exploring intervention activities, the conditions which enable these and the consequences of these (Sayer, 2000) to build up a picture of a mechanisms.”

“Such a technique corresponds with the critical realist distinction between necessary and contingent conditions, where most social mechanisms and processes are held to depend on contingent relations (Archer et al., 1998; Sayer, 2000).”

“face for what might have produced them [38, 39].”

“The research adopted a retroductive process (Sayer 2000) within an interpretivist epistemology, using both primary and secondary data.”

“For Critical Realism, objectivity refers to what is true independently of any subject judging it to be true (Sayer, 2000).”

“Our inductive approach was informed by grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss 2008), striving for empirical validity of qualitative data gathered, and ensuring the real world “fit” of our explanations (Sayer 2000).”

“This paper, in other words, and critical realism more generally, is committed to what Sayer calls moderate essentialism about both natural and social Unauthenticated Download Date | 10/25/19 9:19 AM entities (Sayer 2000, p. 81–89).”

“…of neglect to be thorough, an evidence-based approach to systematically construct a layered social reality attentive to these interlocking issues is required (Helm, 2010; McNaughton, 2009; Sayer, 2000), while maintaining a focus on the child (Department of Health [DoH], 2000; Dyke, 2019).”

“Reality is not existing but emergent and includes both the actual and the many possibilities (Sayer 2000; Zhao 2021, 53 – 54).”

“Other entities have external relationships, meaning their causal powers and liabilities may interact, but are not prerequisites for one another’s existence (Sayer 2000).”

“…to ontology.11 (iv) They also ignore the well-established “stratified” approaches to the politics of inquiry in social theory (James, 2006) and how that has been reinterpreted in EER (Nakagawa & Payne, 2018), but also that from Roy Bhaskar’s “critical realism” (and materialism) (e.g., Sayer, 2000).”

“…surface, typically in one or a few cases: ‘What causes something to happen has nothing to do with the number of times we have observed it happening,’ Sayer (2000, 14) points out; ‘Explanation depends instead on identifying causal mechanisms and how they work, and discovering if they have been…”

“However, a realist approach acknowledges that people attach meaning to experiences, and meanings are implicated within causal processes [37]; behaviour therefore cannot be fully explained, as people are conscious beings that act back on the structures and processes of social life [40].”

“He states that ‘we can broadly distinguish two causal ‘powers’ which shape texts: on the one hand, social structures and social practices; on the other hand, social agents, the people involved in social events (Archer 1995; Sayer 2000)’ (Fairclough 2003, 22).”

“…and never produced entirely under our terms alone since ‘ human agency is both . . . production , and (normally unconscious) reproduction of the conditions of production, including society ’ (original emphases, Bhaskar 2011, 92) and society is always, already spatial (Sayer 2000, 110).”

“Contingency refers to an event whose occurrence is possible but not necessary or evident (e.g. Sayer 2000, 123).”

“In this way the model moves towards a critical realist philosophy that allows for alternating back and forth between empirical realities and the social processes that produce our understandings of those realities (Forsyth, 2003; Sayer, 2000).”

“…of the ‘Critical Realist’ in that we used the tools of the social scientist to record the case in an accurate and auditable manner, whilst looking through the lens of the philosopher to create an interpretation which led to understanding (Denscombe, 2010; Denzin and Lincoln, 2008; Sayer, 2000).”

“In making sense of professional learning experiences of teachers as a form of social practice, we used critical realism as a methodological framework (Bhaskar, 2008; Sayer, 2000).”

“However, they are not necessarily interrelated or dependent on each other for their continual existence (Sayer, 2000).”

“…Ontology and an Interpretivist Epistemology, that assumes that there may be an objective truth, yet meaning is subjectively constructed (Olsen, 2007; Sayer, 2000), allowing, through the thematic analysis, to infer the multiple fatigue-related motivations, experiences, and meanings of patients.”

“…contexts will be supportive and others will not (Pawson & Tilley 2004; Wong et al. 2012); it provides a deeper understanding and interpretation (Sayer 2000; Wong et al. 2012) of complex educational systems involved in FD. Previous studies suggested that motivation and engagement are mechanisms…”

“It was informed by a realist epistemology, in which a participant’s experiential account is seen to provide an interpretation of the social and technical processes that create his or her work setting.(36) The perspective from which we elicit and read participants’ accounts in this study is that of health services rese…”

“And clearly harks back to a point you made earlier in discussing Method in Social Science , i.e., how to construe ‘is ‘useful’ to believe’, as more than a ‘matter of convenience, but as what appears to be the case, based on the fullest and most rigorously assembled evidence, the best arguments we can find, and the bes…”

“The philosophy of critical realism offers a very similar kind of interpretative tactic (Sayer, 2000).”

“This is because it is difficult to ascribe FIGURE 1 Critical Realist View of Mechanisms (Sayer, 2000, p. 15) 2 of 10 THAPA AND OMLAND universal laws to the success/failure of ICT4D since universal laws are based on the assumption of closed systems and regularities of events, whereas social phenomena always occur in op…”

“…of a state of affairs) and construction (the sedimentation of a construal into an ongoing socio-material process or institution) of crises (Sayer 2000), socially real institutions have resulted, including the credit crisis in the banking sector and the political crisis of the Eurozone…”

“…design was consistent with a critical realist epistemology, which allows gaining some insights into what is occurring and a good understanding of a context from the personal experiences and perspectives of individuals knowledgeable in the area under investigation (Sayer, 2000; Maxwell, 2013).”

“Importantly, social structures are causally efficacious, that is, they can cause things to happen and have an effect in the world (Archer, 1995; Sayer, 2000).”

“A complexity perspective in-forms us that the structure we describe using network analysis has emergent properties (Sayer 2000, pp. 12-13).”

“” While doxxing use within hacker and hacktivist subcultures has primarily been examined in relation to doxxes carried out against out-group members, doxxing also represents a strategy employed against fellow hackers (Fish & Follis, 2016; Serracino-Inglott, 2013). Writing on the hacktivist collective “Anonymous,” for…”

“As with an individual’s intentions, the success or failure of marketing strategies and policies may have little or no bearing on their own strategic or campaign intentions (Sayer, 2000, p. 26).”

“Only after this step is it possible to construct empirical research settings or reduce the phenomena to personal experiences and meanings (Sayer, 2000).”

“Again, the choice for studying particular processes may be debated, but as this is a methodological operation, which does not define ‘immutable unchanging’ properties of an ontological object, it does not perforce imply essentialism (Sayer, 2000).”

“Advertisements frequently incorporate details such as a co-operative’s age, location, and ethnic identity, as well as how they profit from fair trade (Sayer, 2000).”

“Sayer (2000) also noted that generalizability only indicated that a relationship was common, but did not help us to understand its nature.”

“Applying a critical realist approach means taking account of the fact that mental health problems are both socially constructed and influenced by external factors and forces that can be real and independent of any one person or social group (Bhaskar, 2014; Sayer, 2000).”

“The realistic evaluation has a scientific theoretical foundation in critical realism (Sayer, 2000; Bhaskar, 1978) and questions the logical-rational understanding of causality.”

“…mechanisms and tendencies; attentive to stratification and emergent powers; and sensitive to the constraining and enabling effects of contexts (Sayer 2000; Gorski 2004), or re-framed and re-interpreted existing knowledge from homelessness literature in order to better fit this conception of…”

“Scientific knowledge is seen as a process of disclosing what lies underneath experienced events and acknowledging that the observed phenomena do not exhaust what could happen or has happened (Sayer 2000).”