Abstract
Psychological researchers make use of different kinds of methods and strategies when conducting their inquiries. Some of them are inductive in nature. Other methods serve hypothetico-deductive ends. Less well known is a third class of methods that is abductive in character. These methods differ from inductive and hypothetico-deductive methods in that they make use of explanatory considerations in order to judge the worth of research hypotheses and theories. Although researchers frequently engage in explanatory reasoning, there is a dearth of codified abductive methods available for ready use in psychology. Further, scientists do use abductive methods to a limited extent, but they seldom understand them as abductive methods. This chapter discusses a number of different abductive research methods of relevance to psychological research. The first of these, exploratory factor analysis, has been widely employed to generate rudimentary explanatory theories about common causes, although it is not generally recognized as an abductive method. The second method, analogical modeling, can be viewed as an abductive strategy for developing explanatory theories once they have been generated. The third abductive method, known generally as inference to the best explanation, gets formulated in different ways. These methods of inference to the best explanation can be used to evaluate the worth of competing explanatory theories. Theories of explanatory coherence are important in this regard.
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Haig, B.D. (2022). Abductive Research Methods in Psychological Science. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5_64-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5_64-1
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