Welcome. This is an open-access textbook on ontology and social research methods — how the assumptions we make about what the social world is shape every choice about how to study it. It is written for students meeting these ideas for the first time, and for the course coordinators who teach them. It is free to read, share, and adapt.
It is also not a PDF. This book lives on the web, and that changes what it can do: you can annotate any passage and discuss it in the margin, link directly to any chapter or concept, and departments can fork their own edition — the same text, with their course’s own margins. The book is built to improve through the people who read it.
Try it now
Select any sentence on this page. A small Annotate button appears — click it, and the discussion sidebar opens. This works on every page of the book.
Contents
The textbook is published chapter by chapter as each one is finalised, so what you see here is the current edition, not the finished book.
- Chapter 1 — Introduction Setting up the idea of the book.
- Chapter 3 — Reality and the Problem of Unobservables Stratified reality and the three domains, monism, and why the things social research most needs to explain are the ones it cannot directly observe.
In preparation
The remaining chapters — the philosophical groundwork of Part I and the four ontological debates of Part II — will appear here as they are published. New chapters are announced on this page.
Concept index
Short, standalone pages for the ideas the chapters build on. They are linked from wherever they appear in the text — follow them mid-chapter when you need them, or browse them here.
- Critical Realism — the framework this book builds on: one reality, stratified into layers, only some of it observable.
- The Three Domains — the Empirical, the Actual, and the Real: what we observe, what happens, and what makes things happen.
- Monism — one reality rather than two: how stratification avoids the old splits between mind and matter, phenomena and noumena.
- Unobservables — the mechanisms and structures that shape events without ever being directly seen.
- Retroduction — reasoning backwards from an observed pattern to the mechanisms that must exist to produce it.
- Emergence — how wholes come to have powers that their parts do not.
How to read this textbook
Annotate as you read
This site has Hypothes.is built in. Highlight any passage and the sidebar opens along the right edge of the page, showing the conversation anchored to that exact text. Reading annotations is open to everyone; to comment or reply, log in with a free Hypothes.is account. Annotations stay attached to their passage even as the text around them is edited.
New to it? How to comment in the margins is a five-minute walkthrough written for students — including two things worth knowing before you post: every comment is public, and comments from previous years are still on the page.
Suggest an edit
Found a typo, a broken reference, or a paragraph that doesn’t explain what it should? Every page carries an Edit on GitHub link that opens the page’s source text, where you can propose a change with a free GitHub account. A maintainer reviews every suggestion before anything changes in the book — small fixes are as welcome as large ones.
Make it your department’s own
Any department can publish its own edition of this textbook: the same chapters, on the department’s own web address, with its own front page and its own choice of chapters. Reader discussion is not separated per edition — every edition shares the same public annotation layer as this one. Editions remain connected to this canonical version and receive its updates. The full setup guide is here: Setting up a department edition, and the editions already running are listed on the department editions page. If that would suit your course, contact Brandon.
Published at https://social-research-methods.confused4now.org and maintained by Brandon. Unless otherwise noted, all content is licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0 — free to share and adapt, with attribution, under the same licence.
Everyone who has written or corrected a page is credited on the contributors page, which also explains how to join them.
How the book is doing — who is reading it, what is being discussed in the margins, and what is being written or corrected — is kept on the project health page, which rebuilds itself weekly.