Intensive/Extensive Research

Abstract

Intensive and extensive have specific meanings within the philosophy of science known as critical realism. Intensive research investigates causal relationships among phenomena in order to discover the mechanisms that cause an event to take place. Extensive investigations seek to discover how common or widespread a phenomenon is; that is, to uncover empirical regularities. This article places intensive and extensive at the heart of critical realist methodology. It begins with a brief discussion of the terms’ origins, then moves on to a thorough explication of intensive and extensive in critical realist methodology and method. Ontology is treated succinctly. Geographers’ engagements with critical realism – with intensive and extensive particularly – have advanced theoretical understandings of place and space over the past 25 years. Intensive realist studies reinvigorated a new regional geography. Current treatments of critical realism in geography are less likely than earlier ones to be explicit about intensive and extensive research. Critical realism has been taken up by other disciplines, including education and nursing where geographers may make important contributions, drawing particularly on intensive and extensive.