PRINCIPLES FOR CONDUCTING CRITICAL REALIST CASE STUDY RESEARCH IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS.

Author List: Wynn, Jr. Donald; Williams, Clay K.;
MIS Quarterly, 2012, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 787-810.
Critical realism is emerging as a viable philosophical paradigm for conducting social science research, and has been proposed as an alternative to the more prevalent paradigms of positivism and interpretivism. Few papers, however, have offered clear guidance for applying this philosophy to actual research methodologies. Under critical realism, a causal explanation for a given phenomenon is inferred by explicitly identifying the means by which structural entities and contextual conditions interact to generate a given set of events. Consistent with this view of causality, we propose a set of methodological principles for conducting and evaluating critical realism-based explanatory case study research within the information systems field. The principles are derived directly from the ontological and epistemological assumptions of critical realism. We demonstrate the utility of each of the principles through examples drawn from existing critical realist case studies. The article concludes by discussing the implications of critical realism based research for IS research and practice.
Keywords: case study research; causal explanation; Critical realism; methodology; philosophy
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#163 0.311 critical realism theory case study context affordances activity causal key identifies evolutionary history generative paper events lead mechanisms evolution change
#21 0.275 research information systems science field discipline researchers principles practice core methods area reference relevance conclude set focus propose perspective inquiry
#32 0.121 research studies issues researchers scientific methodological article conducting conduct advanced rigor researcher methodology practitioner issue relevance findings validation papers published
#167 0.081 workflow tools set paper management specification command support formal implemented scenarios associated sequence large derived taxonomies called given systematic specifications
#294 0.059 development systems methodology methodologies information framework approach approaches paper analysis use presented applied assumptions based proposed described examines basis proposes