There were 4.1 million children living in poverty in the UK in 2017– 18, 30 per cent of everyone aged under 18 years and up to 58 per cent in the most deprived areas. How can critical realism (CR) add to the present extensive health and illness research about them? This chapter summarises a range of useful CR concepts linked to transformative change over time.

Research reports tend to be static, presenting data about a brief period in the lives of the people concerned. Even longitudinal research tends to collect moments or episodes at intervals during participants’ lifetimes like a series of photos. And although multivariate analysis links earlier events to later ones (such as early years’ experiences and later health levels), there may be little sense of how or why these connect, apart from the timeless coincidence of correlation. Positivist researchers evade temporal analysis when they stay at the empirical and actual levels of evidence, discrete events and fixed effects but do not show the time sequences from unseen causes to evident effects. This chapter is about how research on processes of change can be more like a film, showing continuities, sequences and connections.