July 2026 By the time a realist project (review or evaluation) starts, often a lot of thinking has already gone into it. The questions are (or should be) suitably realist, a pilot or scoping review may have already taken place, and informal conversations have all likely informed the project rationale. This is all useful for building the project’s initial programme theory (IPT)* but the trouble can sometimes be that all of this thinking sits within one person’s head, often the

Nora Ephron famously once said, everything is copy. I agree. This is why I present to you a new SIG initiative called Notes on craft. Over the coming months, serialised meetings notes will be published on this blog, documenting conversations between myself and research fellow Alankrita Singh as we undertake a realist project together. The meeting notes are based on methodological conversations we have been having since November 2025. Shared in collaboration (and with artwork

We wanted to take a moment to note a few activities coming from the Realist Health and Social Care Workforce SIG. First up is an...

Join us, for a monthly read-along, of Ray Pawson's How to think like a realist a methodology for social science. Photo curtesy of Edward...

In November, we hosted our fourth SIG meeting, RAMESES: where have we been and where are we going? This session was delivered by Dr Geoff...

In March, we hosted our third SIG meeting, The role of PPI in realist approaches. During this workshop we heard from four public...

In this blog Dr Ruth Abrams and Professor Jill Maben share their experience of using open science to showcase the conceptualisation of an...

In this blog Dr Ruth Abrams and Professor Heather Gage share their thoughts about working on realist evaluations with a health economic...

In March 2023, we held our second SIG meeting. In this session we had three fabulous speakers: Professor Karen Mattick, University of...

In this blog post Dr Ruth Abrams, Georgette Eaton, Claire Duddy, Dr Hannah Kendrick and Dr Jo Howe sit down (virtually) to discuss how...

We held our first online meeting in September 2022 and had a brilliant turn out. Ruth and Georgette have produced a summary of this...

Hello! We're so glad you're here. Welcome. We're Ruth Abrams and Georgette Eaton and we set up this group because of our shared interests...