Search results for "Critical realism"

Four steps to identify mechanisms of ICT4D: A critical realism-based methodology

2018

A realist approach to thematic analysis: making sense of qualitative data through experiential, inferential and dispositional themes

2021

Thematic analysis (TA) is the most widely used method for analysing qualitative data. Recent debates, highlighting the binary distinctions between reflexive TA grounded within the qualitative parad...

Methodological Approach for Identifying Mechanisms in ICT4D: A Critical Realism Perspective

2017

Part 4: Social Mechanisms of ICT-Enabled Development; International audience; The ontological questions ‘What is ICT?’ and ‘What is development?’ are described and documented in literature. Similarly, methodological approaches for understanding how ICT leads to development or for measuring the impact of ICT are described. However, explaining ‘why’ ICT works or not in the contexts of developing countries needs further investigation. We propose a critical realism based methodological approach for answering the above mentioned ‘why’-question. The core of a critical realism based approach is to identify the underlying mechanism(s) that may explain a phenomenon of why ICT leads to development. W…

Critical realism and ICT4D: editorial introduction to the special issue of EJISDC

2018

From athletic talent development to dual career development? A case study in a Finnish high performance sports environment

2020

The focus of dual career (DC) research has shifted from exploring individual experiences within Athletic Talent Development Environments (ATDEs) toward understanding the impact of the environment and the broader cultural context on individuals’ developmental trajectories in Dual Career Development Environments (DCDEs). To comply with national and EU recommendations for socially responsible elite sport, many successful ATDEs list DC as one of their primary values and advertise themselves as DCDEs in order to attract more athletes. The present study aimed to evaluate whether and how a talent development environment for youth athletes in Finland has transformed from an ATDE to DCDE by explorin…

Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and the Social Science of Marxian Economics

2018

This article supports claims that critical realism philosophy of science, as refounded in the hands of Roy Bhaskar, offers valuable knowledge enhancing insight into the advancement of Marx’s research program. However, it maintains that key principles set out by Bhaskar have not been adequately assimilated by those working with critical realism in the field of Marxist studies. When they are properly considered, they point to the necessity of reconstructing Marx’s corpus on a divergent basis from the conventional form it has assumed since the codification of “Marxism” by Karl Kautsky in the late nineteenth century as an overarching theory of history or historical materialism, wherein Marx’s e…

Therapy the Natural Way: A Realist Exploration of the Wilderness Therapy Treatment Process in Adolescent Mental Health Care in Norway

2018

Wilderness therapy has the potential to meet the specific needs of the current adolescent population by providing a rather unique outdoor group treatment. Wilderness therapy is not a new approach to mental health treatment, but its theoretical basis is not yet clearly delineated, in part because of the diversity found across programs and contexts. This article presents a critical realist exploration of a wilderness therapy program that was recently implemented as part of adolescent mental health services in Southern Norway. In this study, we combine fieldwork and interviews for an in-depth investigation of the treatment process, where the objective was to acquire a deeper understanding of t…

Nuovo realismo e metodi di ricerca misti

2014

Il nuovo realismo ha evidenziato i limiti del costruttivismo sociale e del cosiddetto «pensiero debole», che rischia di sfociare nel nichilismo. Sono stati recentemente rimossi dei pregiudizi che impedivano di cogliere la realtà dei fatti educativi nella sua concreta evidenza. Tuttavia un’apertura alla prospettiva metafisica offrirebbe al nuovo realismo ulteriori spazi epistemologici. In tale senso il contributo del realismo critico potrebbe aiutare a superare l’artificiosa antinomia tra il ruolo attivo del soggetto conoscente e la rilevazione oggettiva dei fatti educativi. Se si realizzasse questa apertura la conoscenza scientifica e la conoscenza corrente non sarebbero più viste come anti…

Exploring Collective Action Dynamics in Online Communities from a Critical Realist Perspective

2016

Scholars have been increasingly studying Online Communities (OCs) for a variety of purposes, focusing on issues like individual motivation, knowledge sharing, and governance structure. Few studies focused on the entanglement among technology, people, and organizational structures that support working dynamics within OCs. This paper addresses this issue by exploring causal mechanisms sustaining the collective actions of OCs through a retroduction process. Based on the study of the OC of an Italian political movement, the Five Star Movement, the concept of affordance is involved to describe the generative mechanisms and new affordances are identified on collective action within OCs. Our work …

How (Not) to Write the History of Pragmatist Philosophy of Science?

2008

This survey article discusses the pragmatist tradition in twentieth century philosophy of science. Pragmatism, originating with Charles Peirce's writings on the pragmatic maxim in the 1870s, is a background both for scientific realism and, via the views of William James and John Dewey, for the relativist and/or constructivist forms of neopragmatism that have often been seen as challenging the very ideas of scientific rationality and objectivity. The paper shows how the issue of realism arises in pragmatist philosophy of science and how some pragmatists, classical and modern, have attempted to deal with it. Various dimensions of the realism dispute are thus discussed, especially realism as c…