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The Importance of Qualitative Research for Causal Explanation in Education

Joseph A. Maxwell
Qualitative Inquiry 2012 18: 655
DOI: 10.1177/1077800412452856

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Joseph A. Maxwell1

Abstract
The concept of causation has long been controversial in qualitative research, and many qualitative researchers have rejected
causal explanation as incompatible with an interpretivist or constructivist approach. This rejection conflates causation with
the positivist theory of causation, and ignores an alternative understanding of causation, variously known as a “generative,”
“process,” or “realist” approach, which is influential in philosophy and is becoming widespread in the social sciences and
history. This alternative approach to causation is compatible with the practice and “theory-in-use” of many qualitative
researchers and enables qualitative researchers to credibly make and support causal claims. It also enables them to
defend their work against the dismissal of qualitative methods by proponents of “science-based” research, since the latter
assumes a positivist understanding of causation.  Adequate causal explanations in the social sciences depend on the in-depth
understanding of meanings, contexts, and processes that qualitative research can provide.

Keywords
causation, realism, process, ontology

The title of this article is “The Importance of Qualitative
Research for Causal Explanation in Education.” It is not
“The Importance of Causal Explanation for Qualitative
Research in Education.” Much qualitative research provides
valuable and trustworthy accounts of educational settings
and activities, the contexts in which these are situated, and
the meanings that they have for participants, that have noth-
ing directly to do with causation. Although I’ll argue that
causal explanation is a legitimate and important goal for
qualitative research (see Maxwell, 2004a, 2008, 2011a), my
main point is a quite different one—that educational research
desperately needs qualitative approaches and methods if it is
to make valid and useful claims about what works. Although
I have focused my argument on educational research, where
the dismissal of qualitative research in some quarters has
been particularly virulent, this argument applies to the social
sciences generally, and in fact, to natural science as well.
This argument draws on a point that I have made else-
where (Maxwell, 2004a)—that so-called “scientific research”
in education, which assumes that investigations of causation
in educational settings must necessarily be quantitative, with
randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the best way to con-
duct such investigations,1 is based on a narrow, incomplete,
and dated conception of causality. (I address this conception
in more detail below.)
But to build my case that qualitative research can make
an essential contribution to causal inquiry in education, I
need to address the question that motivated this collection
of articles—why many qualitative researchers believe that
causation is an inappropriate concept in qualitative research.
Despite some notable exceptions (e.g., Coffey & Atkinson,
1996, p. 243; Erickson, 1986, p. 82; Fielding & Fielding,
1986, p. 22; Huberman & Miles, 1985; Schwandt, 1997,
p. 14), this rejection of causation has been a widespread and
pervasive assumption within the qualitative community;
particularly influential statements of this position are those
by Lincoln and Guba (1985, p. 141) and Guba and Lincoln
(1989, pp. 44, 86). The recently published two-volume Sage
Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research (Given, 2008) had no
entries for cause or causation, and the only nondismissive
mention of causation in the third edition of the Handbook of
Qualitative Research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005a) was in the
chapter on qualitative evaluation and social policy (House,
2005), where the issue of causation is almost impossible to
avoid. (There are no nondismissive mentions of causation
in the fourth edition of the Handbook; Denzin & Lincoln,
2011). The author of one of the finalist dissertations for the
qualitative dissertation award given by the Qualitative
Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational
Research Association in 2011, Brianna Kennedy, confided
1
George Mason University, Fairfax,VA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Joseph A. Maxwell, PhD, George Mason University, George Mason
University 6D2, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax,VA 22030-4444, USA
Email: jmaxwell@gmu.edu

Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com by guest on September 8, 2012

656 Qualitative Inquiry 18(8)
to me that she felt that “even uttering the word ‘causal’ in
qualitative methodology circles was akin to invoking evil
spirits.”
This is particularly puzzling given that most of us accept
the concept of causation in our everyday lives. We believe
that when our car doesn’t start, a mechanic can discover the
cause of this and fix the problem. Most of us also believe
that greenhouse gases released by human activity are caus-
ing the earth to become warmer, regardless of how many
people believe this theory. This acceptance of causation
isn’t limited to the physical world; most of us also believe
that changing people’s understanding of, and motivation to
act on, global warming can cause a reduction in the amount
of greenhouse gases we produce. As the philosopher Hilary
Putnam has said,
whether causation “really exists” or not, it certainly
exists in our “life world.”. . . The world of ordinary
language (the world in which we actually live) is full
of causes and effects. It is only when we insist that
the world of ordinary language . . . is defective . . .
and look for a “true” world . . . that we end up feeling
forced to choose between the picture of “a physical
universe with a built-in structure” and “a physical
universe with a structure imposed by the mind.”
(1990, p. 89)
So how did we get ourselves into a situation in which we
deny in our epistemology and methodology what we accept
in our everyday lives? A major reason for—can I say “cause
of”?—this rejection of causation by qualitative researchers
was the positivist account of causation, which was dominant
in philosophy for most of the 20th century and had a power-
ful influence on quantitative and experimental research. This
account, generally known as the “regularity” or “succession-
ist” theory of causation, was derived from David Hume’s
analysis of causality (1739/1978), as further developed by
J. S. Mill (1843/1988) and Carl Hempel (Hempel &
Oppenheim, 1948). It held that we can’t directly perceive
causal relationships, only what Hume called the “constant
conjunction” of events. Hume denied that we can have any
knowledge of causality that goes beyond the observed regu-
larities in the association of events and repudiated any refer-
ence to unobservable mechanisms. In its current manifestation,
it holds that the demonstration of causation is simply a matter
of showing that there is a regular, law-like relationship
between two variables, so that a change in the first (“indepen-
dent”) variable results in a change in the second (“depen-
dent”) variable (National Research Council, 2002). This
account is the basis for some of the current, most respected
quantitative approaches to causal research (e.g., Mulaik,
2009, pp. 63-87; Murnane & Willett, 2010, pp. 26-38).2
Although logical positivism is no longer a viable phi-
losophy of science, and the term “positivist” is often used
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far too loosely to discredit anyone who is seen as insuffi-
ciently “progressive” in their approach to research, the term
is in this case an accurate description of this approach. The
regularity theory of causation is a genuine living fossil that
is consistent with basic logical positivist premises and has
survived in virtually unchanged form since the positivist
era. This concept of causation fits perfectly with quantita-
tive research, which is ideally suited to identifying consis-
tent associations between variables, and it is the basis for
the claim that quantitative methods are the only way to val-
idly establish causal conclusions.
I think that there have been four main reasons that quali-
tative researchers rejected the regularity view of causation
as valid for qualitative research:
1. They associated it with the positivist commitment
to “objective” knowledge of reality, implying that
causes could be accurately identified in a theory-
neutral way.
2. They saw it as mechanical and deterministic, as
ruling out human agency, and as incompatible
with an interpretivist understanding of human
thought and action.
3. They saw it as denying the importance, not only of
the meanings that things had for people, but of the
importance of context and the need to take unique
circumstances into account in understanding why
some event or outcome occurred.
4. Finally, they understood that it dismissed the idea
of process, of the possibility of understanding not
just whether there was an association between
variables, but of how one thing influenced another,
a goal that was central to Blumer’s view of sym-
bolic interactionism (1956).3
However, in rejecting the regularity understanding of
causation, qualitative researchers threw the baby out with
the bathwater. For at about the same time that this rejection
of causality was gaining force in qualitative research, an
alternative concept of causation was being developed, in
both philosophy (Bhaskar, 1978, 1989; Salmon, 1984, 1989,
1998) and in social science (Mohr, 1982). This theory,
which has variously been termed a “realist,” “generative,”
or “process” approach, abandoned the Humean restriction
of our understanding of causation to observed regularities
and argued for the reality of causal processes. As subse-
quently developed in the social sciences and in history, this
alternative theory saw causal explanation as fundamentally a
matter of identifying the actual processes that resulted in a
specific outcome in a particular context (Little, 2010;
Pawson & Tilley, 1997; Sayer, 1992; for a more detailed dis-
cussion of the relevance of this approach for qualitative
research, see Maxwell, 2011a). Little, addressing causation
in history, argued that
Maxwell 657
it is very important for historians to arrive at deeper
understandings of the metaphysics of social causa-
tion. This means, first, understanding the complete
inadequacy of the traditional positivist interpretations
of causation: “causation is no more than regularity.”
This Humean view does not serve the natural sciences
well, and it certainly does not help us when it comes
to social causation. So it is necessary to explore a dif-
ferent model of causation that fits better with what we
know about the actual workings of social processes.
The model developed above is “causal realism.”
(Little, 2010, p. 218)
This theory removes most of the barriers to the accep-
tance of causation by qualitative researchers (Maxwell,
2004a, 2004b, 2008, 2011a). First, it identifies process as a
necessary and central aspect of causation, a view that is
characteristic not only of our everyday understanding of
causation but is implicit in the work of many qualitative
researchers. It validates not only the idea that causal pro-
cesses can in some situations be directly observed (Maxwell,
2004a; Scriven, 2008), but also that they can be established
in single cases, without the need for comparison or quantita-
tive measurement (Cartwright, 2000; Salmon, 1998, p. 15).
Causation is thus fundamentally local rather than general
(Cartwright, 1999, 2000, 2007; Huberman & Miles, 1985);
causal generalizations are necessarily secondary to particu-
lar causal understanding.
Second, it makes context intrinsic to causal explanation.
Causal processes always operate within a real context, and
this context is inextricably involved in the outcome of that
process (Pawson & Tilley, 1997). The causally relevant
contexts for understanding some phenomenon include not
only the immediate physical and social situation but also
broader social and cultural contexts, as argued by Anderson
and Scott (2012). These contexts can’t be reduced to a set of
“extraneous variables” without misrepresenting the nature
of the causal process (Blumer, 1956, 1969).
Third, it extends causal efficacy to beliefs, values, inten-
tions, and meanings, not just to physical objects and events
(Pawson, 2006, pp. 27-29; Sayer, 1992, pp. 110-112). The
view that beliefs and reasons have causal consequences is
a position that has repeatedly been defended in philosophy
(Davidson, 1980, 1993, 1997; McGinn, 1991; Putnam,
1999; Robb & Heil, 2003) and is generally accepted in both
our everyday explanation of people’s behavior and in psy-
chology as a science. However, the sharp separation of
“meaning” and “cause” explanations by Dilthey (discussed
by Donmoyer in his article in this issue), Weber, Winch, and
others has been far more influential in qualitative research.4
From the realist perspective presented here, meanings
and beliefs are part of the causal processes that operate in
human individuals and communities, and any attempt to
explain what happens in human groups that ignores the
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meanings and intentions of the members of these groups is
seriously deficient and unlikely to be productive (Menzel,
1978). The fundamental premise of symbolic interaction-
ism “is that people act in accordance with their definitions
of situations, so that explanations are dependent on under-
standing those definitions” (Hewitt, 1984, p. 269, cited by
Goldenberg, 1992, p. 524)
Finally, an ontology that accepts the reality of causation is
quite compatible with a constructivist epistemology that
holds that our understanding of the world, including our
understanding of causation and causal relationships, is neces-
sarily our own creation, incomplete and fallible, rather than
an “objective” perception of reality (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 185;
Campbell, 1988, p. 447; Keller, 1992, pp. 73-74; Lakoff,
1987, p. 265; for a detailed justification of this claim, see
Maxwell, 2011a).5
From this perspective, I disagree with Donmoyer’s view
(2012) that causality is a “convenient fiction.” The idea that
theories about the world are “convenient fictions” is another
vestigial holdover from logical positivism. Positivists argued
that theoretical terms and concepts were simply logical con-
structions based on, and defined by, observational data, “fic-
tions” that were useful in making predictions but which had
no claim to any “reality” (Norris, 1983; Phillips, 1987, p. 40).
This view, generally termed “instrumentalism,” was (and
remains) influential in psychology and the social sciences
long after it was abandoned in philosophy (Salmon, 1984,
pp. 5-7).
Seeing our understanding of causation as a construction
does not make it “fictional,” for at least two reasons. First, as
a construction, causation points to and captures (although not
“reflects”; see Keller, 1992, pp. 73-74) something about real-
ity, an aspect of reality that can resist or fail to accommodate
to our constructions of it (Blumer, 1969). Second, as a con-
cept held by real human beings, this construction is itself real:
It influences our actions (e.g., a realist concept of causation
played a major causal role in my writing this article).
Accepting the legitimacy of causation in qualitative
research does not put us on a slippery slope leading back to
positivism or foundationalism. A realist process theory of
causation constitutes a rejection of the basic premises of the
positivist understanding of causation as well as being
incompatible with other aspects of positivism (Maxwell,
2011a, pp. 8-9; Schwandt, 1997, pp. 133-134). The linking
of ontological realism and epistemological constructivism
that I advocate here is also explicitly antifoundationalist in
rejecting any fundamental beliefs or assumptions about
reality other than that it exists. Reality is more complex than
any belief or theory can fully capture; multiple valid under-
standings of any phenomenon are possible (see Maxwell,
2011b), and all beliefs and assumptions are tentative and
subject to revision.
This view of causation is compatible with, and in fact
supports, the actual methods and interpretive concepts and
658 Qualitative Inquiry 18(8)
approaches used by many qualitative researchers—what
Argyris and Schoen (1992) called the “theory-in-use” of
these researchers. It is even explicit in the work of some
qualitative researchers; for example, Weiss (1994)
argued,
In quantitative interview studies the demonstration of
causation rests heavily on the description of a visual-
izable sequence of events, each event flowing into the
next. . . . Quantitative studies support an assertion of
causation by showing a correlation between an earlier
event and a subsequent event. An analysis of data
collected in a large-scale sample survey might, for
example, show that there is a correlation between the
level of the wife’s education and the presence of a
companionable marriage. In qualitative studies we
would look for a process through which the wife’s
education or factors associated with her education
express themselves in marital interaction. (p. 179)
However, it is not compatible with the espoused theory
of some qualitative researchers—a radical constructivist or
relativist ontology that denies the reality of causation. What
I am arguing is there are good reasons to question this
espoused theory, and to try to better understand the theory-
in-use that we employ in our work.
This view of causation is also essential to any approach
to causation that can be of real use to social and educa-
tional researchers. This is most clearly illustrated by
mixed-method studies that combined qualitative and quan-
titative approaches in ways that respected the value of both
approaches and supported a dialog between the two. Good
examples of this can be found in the collection of mixed-
method studies edited by the ethnographer Tom Weisner,
with the title Discovering Successful Pathways in Children’s
Development (Weisner, 2005). In these studies, the insights
gained by the qualitative researchers were essential to the
causal conclusions that emerged from the study, and in one
study they not only refocused the quantitative data collection
on the outcomes that emerged from the qualitative work, but
“led us to develop an overall conceptual framework for
thinking about the mechanisms through which changes in
outcomes due to moves out of high-poverty areas might
occur” (Kling, Liebman, & Katz, 2005, p. 244).
I also believe that incorporating causal inference in qual-
itative research supports, rather than undermines, social jus-
tice agendas for our work. A particularly good example of
this is Dixiane Hallaj’s recent award-winning dissertation
Caught by Culture and Conflict: Palestinian Refugee
Women’s Perceptions of Illiteracy and Education (2006),
which grew out of her work to establish family literacy cen-
ters within the refugee camps in the West Bank. Hallaj
explicitly identified cultural, environmental, and political
causes of these women’s illiteracy and the ways in which
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these causes interact, and described ways in which these
causes might be alleviated.
A second example is a recent book by Stuart Buck,
Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation (2011),
in which he argued that the perception that academically
successful Black students are “acting white” is a real phe-
nomenon that causes serious problems in school for Black
students, and is itself an unintended consequence of the way
desegregation was implemented. It seems to me that if you
want to work against injustice and oppression, you need to
understand the causes of the particular forms of injustice
and oppression you are dealing with, and how to counteract
and overcome these causes.
In conclusion, I am making two claims. First, I am argu-
ing that qualitative researchers can draw and support causal
conclusions—that this is not an inappropriate aspiration.
We are able to do this by focusing on the causal processes,
mental as well as physical, that result in particular out-
comes, rather than by simply demonstrating that a relation-
ship exists between particular variables. Not all qualitative
researchers aspire to draw such conclusions, and that is
legitimate, but there are no good philosophical or method-
ological prohibitions against our doing this.
I am not just arguing that we can do this, but that we’re
good at it. We have the methods that allow us to both develop
and test causal explanations in education. However, we could
be better at it. Drawing causal conclusions is challenging even
in the best of conditions, and attempting to generalize such
conclusions is even more difficult. If we want to credibly
make such claims to a wider audience, we need to be system-
atic and rigorous in providing evidence that supports these
claims and that addresses potential validity threats to these
claims; I provide elsewhere a detailed discussion of methods
that qualitative researchers can use for this (Maxwell, 2004b,
2011a). However, in doing this, we also need to challenge
the positivist assumptions that typically inform “evidence-
based” approaches to research (Maxwell, 2009).
Second, I am arguing that educational research, and social
research generally, requires such qualitative approaches if it
is to credibly identify the actual causes that influence a par-
ticular outcome, let alone to make claims about the broader
efficacy of any intervention. Pawson (2006) argued,
The nature of causality in social programmes is such
that any synthesis of evidence on whether they work will
need to investigate how they work. This requires unearth-
ing information on mechanisms, contexts, and outcomes.
The central quest is to understand the conditions of
programme efficacy and this will involve the synthesis
in investigating for whom, in what circumstances, and
in what respects a family of programmes work. (p. 25)
The idea that randomized experiments or structural
equation models can provide valid general conclusions
Maxwell 659
about the effect of an intervention, in the absence of any
understanding of the actual causal processes that were operat-
ing, the specific contexts in which these processes were situ-
ated, or the meaning that the intervention and contexts had for
participants, is an illusion. We need qualitative methods and
approaches in order to understand “what works” and why.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. For a particularly scathing critique of the idea that RCTs (ran-
domized controlled trials) are the “gold standard” for causal
inference, see Scriven (2008).
2. One statistician who was not committed to the regularity the-
ory, and who sought to understand causal processes in particu-
lar cases, was David Freedman (2010). The philosopher Nancy
Cartwright, whose work (e.g., 2007) represents some of the best
thinking about using quantitative methods in causal research,
has provided a detailed argument for what she called “causal
pluralism,” the view that what causes are and what they do var-
ies from case to case. She stated that current approaches “are
not alternative, incompatible views about causation; they are
rather views that fit different kinds of causal systems” and that
“there is no single interesting characterizing feature of causa-
tion; hence no off-the-shelf or one-size-fits-all method for
finding out about it, no ‘gold standard’ for judging causal rela-
tions” (2007, p. 2).
3. The National Research Council Report Scientific Research in
Education (2002) acknowledged the value of understanding
mechanisms, but made this subordinate to, and dependent on,
the quantitative demonstration of a causal relationship between
variables, and claimed that even the understanding of mecha-
nisms was necessarily a primarily quantitative activity (see
Maxwell, 2004a).
4. For example, Howe (2011) has recently presented a different
analysis of causality in qualitative research from the one pro-
posed here, accepting the validity of this concept, but arguing
that causation of intentional phenomena (I-causation) is different
in kind from that of natural phenomena (N-causation). Although
I endorse his recognition of causation in human interactions, and
his position that qualitative and quantitative methods can both be
used for intentional and physical phenomena, I think that his
analysis in terms of two kinds of phenomena still leaves as mys-
terious the interaction between the two, an interaction that is
intrinsic to our everyday understanding of causation.
In addition, Howe still seems to implicitly rely on a regularity
understanding of causality, for both natural and intentional
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phenomena. Thus, he describes both types of causation as
“establishing and accounting for ordered patterns of human
behavior” (p. 166; emphasis added). Although Howe acknowl-
edges that for N-causation there is a realist/process alternative
to the regularity view, he makes no mention of this in his dis-
cussion of intentional causation, and never addresses the pos-
sibility of causal explanations of singular events, as opposed to
regularities.
5. Smith (2008; Smith & Deemer, 2000) argued that the con-
straints of a constructivist epistemology make it impossible for a
realist ontology to have any practical value. (This is one manifes-
tation of what has been called the “ontological-epistemological
collapse,” which sees ontology as simply a reflection of episte-
mology, for example, Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b, p. 203.) I have
argued elsewhere (Maxwell, 2008, 2011a; Maxwell & Mittapalli,
2010) that this is simply false, and that a realist ontology has
important implications for research that are not incompatible
with a constructivist epistemology.
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Bio
Joseph A. Maxwell is a professor in the College of Education
and Human Development at George Mason University, where he
teaches courses on qualitative and mixed-method research
design and methods. He is the author of Qualitative Research
Design: An Interactive Approach (2nd ed., 2005) and A Realist
Approach for Qualitative Research (2011). His research and
writing include work on research methodology and philosophy,
program evaluation, sociocultural theory, Native American
societies, and medical education; see http://cehd.gmu.edu/
people/faculty/jmaxwell/. He has a PhD in anthropology from
the University of Chicago.