Many of the practical, methodological challenges faced by human factors researchers are rooted in outdated philosophical assumptions. Understanding newer philosophical approaches, especially critical realism, can help us solve many fundamental challenges associated with positivism, falsifications, interpretivism, and postmodernism. Realism is a family of philosophical approaches emphasizing that: (1) a real world exists independently of our perceptions of it; (2) the real world is filled with objects that have the power cause changes in each other, whether or not humans can or do observe these changes; (3) many observable phenomena are caused by unobservable structures. Meanwhile inferring unobservable structures based on what can be observed is both fundamentally challenging and central to human factors research. In this talk, Dr. Ralph will give an overview of critical realism and explore its implications for human factors research, focusing on practical applications for diverse qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Dr. D. Paul Ralph (PhD, British Columbia) is an award-winning scientist, author, consultant, and computer science professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. His research intersects software engineering, project management and human-computer interaction. Dr. Ralph’s research has been published in premier software engineering outlets including the International Conference on Software Engineering and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He has received funding from Google, The National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Dr. Ralph is the editor-in-chief of the Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research.