Guidelines for Conducting a Critical Realist Case Study

Guidelines for Conducting a Critical Realist Case Study

Deepak Saxena
Copyright: © 2021 |Pages: 13
DOI: 10.4018/IJAET.2021040102
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Abstract

The case study is a widely used methodology among qualitative researchers irrespective of their philosophical orientation. While positivist and interpretive philosophies are the two most popular research philosophies across diverse research fields, critical realism offers a third alternative. Critical realism is a research philosophy that assumes the existence of an independent reality but also accepts that there may be varied interpretations of it due to a difference in context. Mechanisms are the theoretical building blocks of critical realism and presence, absence, or interaction of certain mechanisms may result in the presence or absence of certain events. However, limited guidelines are available on conducting a critical realist case study. This paper fills this gap by providing some practical guidelines on how a CR-based case study may be planned and executed. Practical guidelines are offered for framing the research question, data collection, writing a narrative, coding, and explanation building while following a critical realist philosophy.
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Background

Bhaskar (1975) initially proposed CR for natural sciences arguing for deeper explanation beyond statistical generalization espoused by the positivist philosophy. Later, he extended it to social sciences (Bhaskar, 1989) arguing for the explanation to move beyond the constructivist accounts of the phenomenon. The critical realist paradigm is ‘realist’ in the sense that it assumes that an external reality – both social and physical – exists irrespective of our acknowledgement or interpretation (Johnson & Duberley, 2000). For a critical realist, physical reality (e.g. flow of liquid in a pipeline), or a social reality (e.g. knowledge flows in an organization) exists irrespective of our understanding of it. The qualifier ‘critical’ denotes that our claims about reality are to be accepted with the assumption that there are significant limitations in terms of the objectivity of our knowledge (Mingers, 2014). At the same time, truth claim in CR is more than the result of social construction. For a critical realist, knowledge generation entails both the engagement with an independent reality and ongoing interpretation of it (Johnson & Duberley, 2000). In other words, social construction process is always bound by an external reality (Sayer, 2010) which exists independently.

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