The palette of literature reviews available for critical realists

Abstract

The chapter gives scholars insight into how different types of literature reviews can be conducted if you do research from a critical realist stance. Some researchers, because of their paradigmatic stances, have predetermined ideas about conducting a literature review. This makes sense if the researcher belongs to the positivist paradigm, where a researcher favours a meta-analysis review (systematically and empirically reviewing quantitative studies), whereas a researcher belonging to the interpretivist paradigm will prefer to conduct meta-synthesis reviews (reviewing qualitative studies and their interpretations). For a critical realist, more approaches are available, with the main proviso that the reviews undertaken are done in a systematic and transparent way. This chapter focuses on the critical realist options and provides researchers with an overview of different types of reviews to choose from. The chapter does not give an exhaustive account of all the reviews existing; rather, it gives scholars insight into the different review varieties that exist and thus prepares the scholar to take an active choice of what review to conduct in connection to its purpose and objectives.