We live in a constantly changing world, which requires reformulating our research questions. CHA is particularly well suited for describing and redescribing this changing and ultimately historical world. It emerged independently in many different disciplines, and thus is spoken many different vernaculars. This book extracts from those vernaculars a common grammar of time, to place CHA on more systematic methodological foundations. The introduction previews key elements of CHA: its reliance on historical thinking to explore social reality; its deployment of a rich temporal vocabulary; and three distinct strands of CHA, each making its own distinct contributions.

Social inquiry needs representations of social reality, and such representations involve ontological choices of how much to freeze history and geography. The freezing metaphor relates to how much social inquiry relaxes conditional independence and unit homogeneity, the two key assumptions of VBA. Unfreezing history and geography brings to light historical and geographic particularities, makes possible new inductive insights into updating theories, and generates new research questions. Comparisons help turn such explorations into discoveries by identifying patterns. CHA employs four comparisons: cross-sectional, serial, contextual, and historical. It thus differs from VBA, which uses comparison for the strictly methodological purpose of controlling for confounders. CHA goes back to the late nineteenth century and has explored four key themes: the evolution of capitalism, regime changes, the administrative transformation of states, and the changing nature of war. CHA does not have a monopoly on historical thinking. VBA employs historical thinking when exploring confounders and historical boundary conditions that might bias their test results.

The conclusion revisits the complementarities between CHA and other methodologies. It emphasizes that exploration and testing are equally important for translating results into answers. It discusses the historical origins of the logical positivists’ distinction between domains of discovery and confirmation, in order to underscore its artificiality and misrepresentation of the actual scientific process. It highlights four contributions that CHA makes to social inquiry more broadly: the centrality of historical thinking across all methods, the beneifts of greater ontological transparency, the importance of paying attention to testworthiness of hypotheses, and the inescapability of methodological heterodoxy.

Critical consciousness (CC) theory emphasizes a form of reflection on social, political, and economic conditions that analyzes the historical root causes of inequity and the ways these inequities are systemically perpetuated and magnified through laws, policies, and institutions. Despite the theoretical centrality of structural and historical thinking in CC, most empirical work on the topic has not incorporated these constructs into measures of critical reflection. The current chapter explores the rationale for measuring structural and historical thinking in critical reflection and considers challenges to doing so. We present factor analytic work showing how new measures of structural and historical attributions can be incorporated into existing measurement of critical reflection. We discuss strengths and weaknesses of this approach and explore the implications of this expanded measure.