03 · What You Need to Know
How Critical Realism Understands Reality, Knowledge, and Causation
Critical Realism Begins With a Crucial Distinction
Something can be real without being directly observable.
Consider gravity. You do not observe gravity itself in the same way you observe a falling object. You observe events that can be explained through mechanisms and structures that are not reducible to the events themselves.
Social research creates a more complicated version of the same problem. Institutional culture, socioeconomic structures, power relations, organizational routines, norms, incentives, and psychological mechanisms may influence observable outcomes without appearing as simple objects researchers can directly count.
Critical realism therefore rejects the idea that reality should be reduced to what researchers can immediately observe or experience.
At the same time, it rejects the opposite move of treating reality as nothing more than our descriptions or interpretations of it.
Where Does Critical Realism Come From?
Critical realism is particularly associated with philosopher Roy Bhaskar, whose work beginning in the 1970s developed a realist philosophy of science and later extended it to social science.
The tradition has since developed substantially across sociology, education, health research, evaluation, organization studies, information systems, economics, and other fields. Different critical realist scholars have extended and debated its concepts, so it should not be treated as one simple methodological recipe.
For researchers, several ideas are especially consequential: ontological realism, epistemic fallibility, stratified reality, generative causation, emergence, open systems, and explanatory reasoning concerned with underlying mechanisms.
Ontological Realism: Reality Is Not Created by Our Knowledge of It
Critical realism makes a firm ontological commitment: reality exists independently of our descriptions, theories, measurements, or beliefs about it.
If an institutional mechanism disadvantages a group of students, that mechanism does not cease to operate simply because researchers have not yet identified it. Likewise, researchers can be wrong about what causes an outcome without causing the outcome itself to disappear.
This distinction between reality and our knowledge of reality is fundamental.
Critical realism therefore differs from positions that collapse what exists into what can be observed or known. It also differs from stronger constructionist interpretations in which the distinction between reality and knowledge about reality may be conceptualized differently.
Epistemic Relativism Does Not Mean "Anything Goes"
Although reality exists independently, our knowledge of it is produced through theories, concepts, methods, language, disciplinary traditions, and historical circumstances.
Critical realists therefore distinguish ontology from epistemology.
What exists is not identical to what researchers currently believe exists.
This means scientific knowledge can change. A theory may explain available evidence reasonably well and later be replaced by a better explanation. Researchers can disagree. Measurements can fail. Concepts can be revised.
But critical realism does not infer that all explanations are equally good. Competing accounts can be evaluated against empirical evidence and their explanatory power. Some explanations may provide substantially better accounts of the mechanisms capable of producing observed events.
Ontological realism
A reality exists independently of researchers' knowledge, descriptions, theories, or perceptions of it.
Epistemic fallibility
Our knowledge of that reality remains partial, theory-dependent, revisable, and potentially mistaken.
Critical Realism Describes Reality as Stratified
One of the best-known features of critical realism is its stratified ontology. Bhaskar distinguished among the empirical, the actual, and the real.
| Domain |
What it refers to |
Simple example |
| Empirical |
Events and experiences that are observed or experienced. |
A researcher observes that a student stops attending classes. |
| Actual |
Events that occur whether or not anyone observes or experiences them. |
The student loses employment, experiences financial difficulties, and eventually withdraws, whether or not the researcher observes each event. |
| Real |
Structures, powers, and generative mechanisms capable of producing events. |
Employment conditions, financial-support systems, institutional policies, or mechanisms affecting belonging and persistence. |
The distinction prevents researchers from treating observed data as though they exhaust reality. What appears in a dataset belongs to the empirical evidence available to the researcher. Events may occur without being recorded, and the mechanisms generating those events may not themselves be directly observable. This stratification is central to critical realist ontology.
Causal Mechanisms Are Central to Critical Realist Explanation
Critical realism conceptualizes causation differently from a simple regularity model in which A causes B because B reliably follows A.
A mechanism is a process, power, or tendency capable of generating an outcome under particular conditions.
Suppose an academic-support program improves persistence in one university but produces little change in another. A simple question asks whether the intervention "works." A critical realist question asks what mechanisms the intervention activates and which contextual conditions enable or suppress those mechanisms.
Perhaps mentoring increases students' sense of belonging, which improves persistence when mentors have sufficient time and institutional credibility. In another setting, overloaded mentors may never establish the relationships necessary for that mechanism to operate.
The intervention is therefore not conceptualized as a button that mechanically produces an outcome. Causal powers operate within conditions.
This focus on mechanisms and contexts has made critical realism particularly useful for studying complex social and educational phenomena. Research informed by critical realism may seek theories capable of explaining the structures and mechanisms that enable or inhibit outcomes across different contexts.
Mechanisms Are Not the Same as Variables
This distinction is easy to miss.
A variable records variation. A mechanism explains a process capable of producing change.
For example, "teacher feedback frequency" may be a measured variable. The mechanism could involve students using timely feedback to identify misconceptions, revise learning strategies, increase confidence, or disengage when feedback is perceived as punitive.
Statistical association between feedback frequency and achievement does not by itself identify which mechanism is operating.
Critical realist research therefore often combines evidence about patterns with evidence capable of developing or evaluating explanations of the processes generating those patterns.
Context Does More Than Modify an Effect
Context is central because mechanisms do not necessarily operate identically everywhere.
A policy may create opportunities that people respond to differently depending on institutional resources, professional norms, social relationships, incentives, prior experiences, or other conditions.
This helps explain why critical realist researchers often resist universal statements such as "intervention X causes outcome Y" without specifying the conditions under which the proposed causal process operates.
The more informative explanation may be that a particular mechanism tends to generate an outcome when enabling conditions are present and may be weakened, blocked, or counteracted under other conditions.
Critical Realism Treats the Social World as an Open System
Controlled experiments can sometimes isolate causal relationships by restricting competing influences. Social life rarely offers that degree of closure.
Schools, universities, workplaces, communities, and health systems contain interacting mechanisms. Policies change. People respond strategically. Institutions differ. Historical conditions matter.
Critical realism therefore commonly treats social reality as an open system in which multiple mechanisms can operate simultaneously.
This means causal explanation cannot always depend on discovering constant event regularities. A mechanism may be real even when it does not produce the same observable outcome every time because other mechanisms or contextual conditions interfere.
Absence of a universal regularity is therefore not necessarily absence of causation.
What Is Emergence?
Critical realism also emphasizes emergence: higher-level phenomena can possess properties or causal powers that cannot be reduced straightforwardly to their individual components.
A university consists of individuals, but institutional culture cannot necessarily be explained simply by adding together individual attitudes. Organizational structures, rules, routines, relationships, and histories can produce properties that affect individuals in return.
Likewise, a classroom is more than a collection of students and a teacher. Interaction patterns can create norms, expectations, and social dynamics that influence learning.
Emergence allows critical realist researchers to examine relationships across levels rather than assuming that all explanations must ultimately be reduced to individual characteristics.
What Is Retroduction?
Critical realism is strongly associated with retroductive reasoning.
Retroduction asks what must be true, or what mechanisms would need to exist, for an observed phenomenon to occur as it does.
The reasoning often begins with an empirical pattern or surprising event and works toward a theoretically plausible explanation of the structures and mechanisms capable of producing it.
Observe A phenomenon or pattern requires explanation.
Ask What mechanisms or structures could plausibly generate this outcome?
Develop competing explanations Use theory, prior evidence, contextual knowledge, and empirical data to identify possibilities.
Investigate Gather and analyze evidence capable of distinguishing among those explanations.
Refine Develop the explanation that best accounts for how the outcome is generated under the conditions studied.
Critical realist research can also use deduction, induction, and abduction. Retroduction is distinctive because it directs attention from observed events toward the conditions and mechanisms that make them possible.
Does Critical Realism Require Qualitative Research?
No.
Qualitative methods can be especially useful for investigating processes, meanings, contextual conditions, and possible mechanisms. Interviews, observations, documents, and case studies may reveal how mechanisms are experienced or enacted.
But critical realism does not equate reality with participants' accounts. Participants can provide important evidence about processes while remaining fallible interpreters of the mechanisms affecting them.
A person's explanation for why something occurred is evidence to analyze, not necessarily the final causal explanation.
Does Critical Realism Require Quantitative Research?
No.
Quantitative methods can identify patterns requiring explanation, estimate distributions and relationships, compare groups, examine temporal changes, test theoretically derived implications, or evaluate whether proposed mechanisms produce observable consequences.
These contributions can be extremely useful within critical realist inquiry.
What quantitative evidence cannot necessarily do alone is identify the generative mechanism underlying an association. The analytical task depends on the research question and the available evidence.
Is Critical Realism Naturally Mixed Methods?
Critical realism is compatible with mixed methods because different forms of evidence can illuminate different levels of a causal explanation.
Quantitative analysis might identify a pattern. Qualitative evidence might illuminate processes and contextual conditions. Documentary or historical analysis might reveal institutional structures. Together, these sources may support a stronger explanation than any one could provide independently.
Research in comparative education, for example, has proposed critical realism as supporting epistemological pluralism and interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and mixed-methods inquiry when researchers seek to explain causal mechanisms operating across contexts.
Still, critical realism does not require mixed methods. Method selection follows the explanatory problem.
How Is Critical Realism Different From Postpositivism?
The distinction deserves care because both acknowledge an external reality and fallible knowledge.
Postpositivism commonly emphasizes empirical testing, fallibility, critical scrutiny, and provisional knowledge. Critical realism shares some of this epistemological caution but develops a distinctive ontology emphasizing stratification, emergence, generative mechanisms, and open systems.
Critical realism therefore asks researchers to explain how underlying structures and causal powers generate events, rather than treating causation primarily as regular relationships among observable variables.
Some older paradigm literature uses "critical realist" language when discussing postpositivism. That should not lead researchers to assume contemporary critical realism and postpositivism are interchangeable philosophical positions.
How Is Critical Realism Different From Interpretivism?
Critical realism shares interpretivism's recognition that social meanings and human interpretations matter. People act partly according to what situations mean to them.
But critical realism does not generally treat actors' interpretations as exhausting social reality.
Structures and mechanisms can influence people even when participants do not recognize them accurately. An institutional rule, economic structure, or organizational mechanism may have causal consequences beyond participants' conscious interpretations.
Interpretive evidence can therefore contribute to critical realist explanation without requiring the researcher to adopt a purely interpretivist ontology.
Critical Realism Is Not Critical Theory
The shared word "critical" causes predictable confusion.
Critical realism and critical theory are different philosophical traditions. Critical realism's "critical" component concerns, among other things, the distinction between reality and our fallible knowledge of it and the possibility of explaining underlying structures. Critical and transformative paradigms place more explicit normative emphasis on power, oppression, inequality, emancipation, and social justice.
Critical realist research can certainly investigate power and inequality. It does not become equivalent to a transformative or critical paradigm merely because both can examine social structures.
