Giorgos Tsiolis - Social Causation and Biographical Research

Social Causation and Biographical Research

This book extends debates in the field of biographical research, arguing that causal explanations are not at odds with biographical research and that biographical research is in fact a valuable tool for explaining why things in social and personal lives are one way and not another. Bringing reconstructive biographical research into dialogue with critical realism, it explains how and why relational social ontology can become a unique theoretical ground for tapping emergent mechanisms and latent meaning structures. Through an account of the reasons for which reductionist epistemologies, rational action models and covering law explanations are not appropriate for biographical research, the authors develop the philosophical idea of singular causation as a means by which biographical researchers are able to forge causal hypotheses for the occurrence of events and offer guidance on the application of this methodological principle to concrete, empirical examples. As such, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in biographical research and social research methods.

Giorgos Tsiolis is Associate Professor of Qualitative Methods in Sociological Research and currently Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Crete, Greece.

Michalis Christodoulou teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Patras, Greece. He is the co-editor of Emotions, Temporalities and Working-Class Identities in the 21st Century .

Routledge Advances in Research Methods

Defending Qualitative Research
Design, Analysis and Textualization
Mario Cardano

Researching Ageing
Methodological Challenges and their Empirical Background
Edited by Maria uszczyska

Diagramming the Social
Relational Method in Research
Russell Dudley-Smith and Natasha Whiteman

Participatory Case Study Work
Approaches, Authenticity and Application in Ageing Studies
Edited by Sion Williams and John Keady

Social Causation and Biographical Research
Philosophical, Theoretical and Methodological Arguments
Georgios Tsiolis and Michalis Christodoulou

Beyond Disciplinarity
Historical Evolutions of Research Epistemology
Catherine Hayes, John Fulton and Andrew Livingstone with Claire Todd, Stephen Capper and Peter Smith

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Research-Methods/book-series/RARM

Social Causation and Biographical Research

Philosophical, Theoretical and Methodological Arguments

Giorgos Tsiolis and Michalis Christodoulou

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

2021 Giorgos Tsiolis and Michalis Christodoulou

The right of Giorgos Tsiolis and Michalis Christodoulou to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tsiolis, Giorgos, 1967- author. | Christodoulou, Michals, author.
Title: Social causation and biographical research: philosophical, theoretical and methodological arguments / Georgios Tsiolis and Michalis Christodoulou.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020028491 (print) | LCCN 2020028492 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367620363 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003107613 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences--Biographical methods.
Classification: LCC HD61.29 .T75 2021 (print) | LCC HD61.29 (ebook) | DDC 300.72/2--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028491
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028492

ISBN: 978-0-367-62036-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-10761-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

In the social sciences, there are three ways through which social researchers can claim explanatory theories: the deductive-nomological (D-N) model, empathy and generative mechanisms. Roughly speaking, these have their philosophical foundations in positivism, hermeneuticsinterpretivism and critical realism (CR), respectively. In the first case, I know something only if I know the general law in which it is subsumed; in the second case, I know something only if I can make it intelligible by specifying an agents beliefs and desires; and in the third case, I know something only if I know what made it what it is. In the past, the deductive-nomological model of explanation enjoyed a monopoly over the meaning of the term explanation, while hermeneutics was the major opponent to such a crude and positivistic account. However, in the last twenty years, mechanism-based explanations have come to constitute a third, distinct philosophical approach to social causation, providing more subtle and promising ideas than the other two, even though some of its assumptions have been shaped by the former. Nevertheless, as we demonstrate in the rest of the book, the proponents of causal mechanisms have tried to differentiate themselves both from the D-N approach and from the statistical Hume-inspired view of causation.

Needless to say, this development has a long history in the philosophy of science, but it has only been in recent years that social scientists have endeavoured to implement most of these philosophical ideas in the realm of social theory and methodology. In this sense, our book is not a treatise on the philosophy of science, but rather aims to elucidate how socio-ontological and epistemological ideas from the philosophy of social science may provide a new language for approaching causal analysis in the philosophy and methodology of qualitative social research. The bedrock of this new language is causal explanation and the reason is that a paradigm shift has taken place in the philosophy of social science. This shift has to do with social scientists gradually acknowledging the need for explaining social phenomena causally, rather than just describing them thickly. We believe that systematic dialogue between the philosophy of social science and social research would be very fruitful for the simple reason that philosophers provide answers regarding, for example, in what sense a social entity is social, while social scientists investigate empirically the extent to which these answers are viable in research practice. In a similar vein, Joas and Knbl (2009, 16) dispute the division of labour between those who