The promise of process tracing methods is that they can help us better understand how things work in real-world cases. Despite the many advances in the past two decades, we contend that existing accounts result in either under-socialised accounts in which the moves made by actors are studied while neglecting the social dimension of action, or over-socialised accounts that are so focused on social context that they neglect the causal process of actors doing things. In this article, we attempt to bridge this divide by merging the conceptual language from the productive/generative account of mechanisms with realist ideas to develop what we term social process tracing (SPT) as a practical research method that captures both the moves performed by actors, the meanings they ascribe to them, and how the underlying social context shapes how social causal processes play out in real-world cases. After developing ontological and epistemological foundations, the article illustrates how SPT can be used in practice.

中文翻译：

---

阐明社会——发展社会过程追踪作为一个综合框架

流程追踪方法的承诺是它们可以帮助我们更好地理解现实世界中事物的运作方式。尽管过去二十年取得了许多进步，但我们认为，现有的账户要么导致社会化程度较低的账户，即研究行动者的行为而忽略了行动的社会维度，要么导致过度社会化的账户过于关注社会因素。他们忽视了行为者做事的因果过程。在本文中，我们试图通过将机制的生产性/生成性描述中的概念语言与现实主义思想相结合来弥合这一鸿沟，以开发我们所说的社会过程追踪（SPT）作为一种实用的研究方法，该方法可以捕获参与者所执行的动作，他们赋予它们的含义，以及潜在的社会背景如何塑造社会因果过程在现实世界案例中的表现。在奠定了本体论和认识论基础之后，本文阐述了如何在实践中使用 SPT。