Aims to provide a space to develop expertise for those with an interest in realist approaches towards interventions, investigations, critiques and methodological developments.
The group offers:
Realist and critical realist approaches require researchers to go beyond developing credible theories to exhausting all possible causal explanations for emergence (Bunt 2016). Critical realists regard themselves as philosophical under-labourers insofar as they use multi-layered frameworks and interdisciplinary approaches to critical inquiry (Bhaskar 2016). Realism is an emancipatory project and an approach to research that recognises the complex and somewhat unpredictable nature of the social world. For instance, people respond to health interventions in diverse ways, choosing to utilise or reject the resources available to them. The realist endeavour in health sciences research is to examine ‘what works for whom, under what circumstances, and how’, to improve practice and the lives of social care recipients (Pawson 1997).
Realist approaches have gained traction in health services research. Their emphasis on causal mechanisms help us contextualise trial results by answering the transcendental question of ‘what must be true in order for this to be the case?’ (Oliver 2012). While our group is particularly interested in realist evaluations and health trials, we see value in interdisciplinarity and welcome those with an interest in realism from other faculties, disciplines and external partners.
Dave's work on ‘retrodiction’ not only gives us a conceptual tool for identifying mechanisms (predicted and not predicted), but also helps us to think about the relationship between mechanisms and the entities they operate within. Dave has developed some key ideas around how we can understand causality, structure, agency, entities and emergence and will help challenge how we understand individual responses to interventions in complex systems. As well as health, social and psychological sciences Dave's work will appeal to colleagues in other faculties and/or departments interested in critical realism or perhaps other areas he writes about such as the digital economy.
In this seminar Dave looked at why causation is a controversial word in the social sciences. Positivists are often accused of a simplistic approach to causation that does not work in the social world, and in response interpretivists have often substituted hermeneutic accounts for explanatory accounts of social action. This seminar explained the critical realist alternative, which reinstates causality but in a more sophisticated form, in which people, social structures and material things are all understood as having causal powers that interact to produce social actions and social events.
It examined both how social structures can influence human action and also how human action itself can be explained using a synthesis of Bourdieu's account of habitus and Archer's theory of reflexivity. Habitus and reflexivity, it argued, refer to different moments of the same process and once we understand how they fit together we can see both the pathways for social influence and the opportunities for individual decision making more clearly.
For more information please visit: http://www.eldervass.com/
Please contact:
Laura Gill MSc
Research Group Co-ordinator
University of Plymouth, Faculty of Health
Room N14, ITTC Building
Plymouth Science Park
Derriford, Plymouth, Devon
PL6 8BX
Tel: +44 (0) 1752 764879
Email: laura.gill@plymouth.ac.uk
