Chapter 1: Scientific Realism
What is Realism?
Naturalistic Realism
Global and Local Realism
Realist Methodology
The Centrality of Method
Realism in the Social Sciences
Chapter 2: Evidence
Social Science Preliminaries
Empirical Evidence and Theory
Coherentism and Naturalism
Varieties of Evidence: Pragmatic Considerations
Chapter 3: Validity
Test Validity, Operational Definition, and Logical Empiricism
Holism, Realism, and Ontological Commitment
Construct Validity and Logical Empiricism
Construct Validity, Generalization in Experiments, and Epistemology
Paradigms of Validity
Coherence Justification
Chapter 4: Grounded Theory
The Abductive Theory of Method
Problem Formulation
Phenomena Detection
Theory Construction
ATOM as Grounded Theory Method
Chapter 5: Factor Analysis
Exploratory Factor Analysis and Scientific Inference
Methodological Challenges to Exploratory Factor Analysis
Exploratory Factor Analysis and Other Factor Analytic Methods
Chapter 6: Case Study
Constitutive and Regulative Rules
What is A Case?
Generalizing From Cases
A Case Study in China
Making Generalizations
Improving Knowledge of Generalizations

Brian Haig is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Canterbury, and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Bath. He is a theoretical psychologist who has published numerous articles in psychology, education, and philosophy journals on the conceptual foundations of quantitative and qualitative research methods, and the nature of psychological science more generally. He recently published a book entitled Investigating the Psychological World (MIT Press, 2014). He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the New Zealand Psychological Society.

With a strong focus on the theoretical, this book covers both the fundamentals and important applications of realist research and clearly illustrates why scientific realism is of such relevance to the social sciences