ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the application of critical realist meta-theory enables to deepen and broaden the level of explanation when conducting empirical research with people with mental distress. It shows how critical realism offers a normative bridge between social understandings of mental distress and disability studies. The chapter deals with speculations on the potential for critical realism to boundary-span social research in disability and social perspectives on mental distress. M. Archer et al. describe critical realism as ‘a meta-theoretical position: a reflexive philosophical stance concerned with providing a philosophically informed account of science and social science which can in turn inform the empirical investigations’. Critical realism takes the position that the world is both constructed and material, and that theory is essential for interpreting and explaining the relationship between construction and reality. Alongside this, critical realism accepts that subjectivity is important but is not ‘value free’–i.e. theories of reality are socially constructed.
