Mapping Typical Theoretical Conceptualizations to Critical Realism: Variance and Process Theories

Critical realism is an increasingly popular epistemology in the social sciences, but it is not necessarily intuitive. It can be challenging for those who are newly introduced to it to understand critical realism in terms of forms of theory that they are familiar with. In this article, we attempt to describe how some more popular forms of expressing theory—variance and process theories—can map to the structure of theory in critical realism.