David Byrne dave.byrne@durham.ac.uk
Emeritus
The social world is complex and emergent. Inquiry, directed towards establishing universal empirical regularities (i.e. nomothetic inquiry), cannot establish causality in such a world. We can never assign a causal effect to any intervention without assessing the whole context of that intervention. However, we can develop generalizable knowledge if we adopt research approaches that recognize both the implications of assigning causal powers to context (the essence of the realist take on evaluation) and the significance of human agency in relation to ‘the social type of causal nexus’. There are literatures that can contribute to developing such knowledge. These include macro-political science’s concern with the importance of temporal ordering in relation to outcomes; Ragin’s set theoretic understanding of causal relations and his development of systematic comparison as a basis for explicating those relations through Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA); and the presentation of causal narratives as foundation for process tracing. Every complex social intervention has to be considered as a ‘case’. Systematic comparison across cases allows us to generalize within limits – but this still means we can transfer knowledge beyond the unique ideographically described instance. We can never establish universal/nomothetic accounts of causality in complex systems by using variable-based methods such as Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs). However, through careful comparison and exploration of complex contingent causation, we can begin to get a handle on what works where (in what context), when (in what temporal context), and in what order.
Byrne, D. (2013). Evaluating Complex Social Interventions in a Complex World. Evaluation, 19(3), 217-228. https://doi.org/10.1177/1356389013495617
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Publication Date | Jul 1, 2013 |
Deposit Date | Jul 2, 2013 |
Publicly Available Date | Jan 7, 2014 |
Journal | Evaluation |
Print ISSN | 1356-3890 |
Electronic ISSN | 1461-7153 |
Publisher | SAGE Publications |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 19 |
Issue | 3 |
Pages | 217-228 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1177/1356389013495617 |
Keywords | Comparative methods, Complexity theory, Negotiated order, Process tracing, Qualitative Comparative Analysis. |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1450309 |
Accepted Journal Article
(311 Kb)
PDF
Copyright Statement
The final definitive version of this article has been published in the journal Evaluation, 19/3,
year of publication © The Author(s) 2013 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Evaluation page: http://evi.sagepub.com/ on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/
Understanding Class in the Post-Industrial Era - Thoughts on Modes of Investigation
(2020)
Journal Article
The Statistics of Devolution
(2019)
Book Chapter
Class after Industry
(2018)
Book
Researching Large Scale Complex Interventions
(2018)
Book Chapter
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search