Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Writing the Case Study [because this is so salient to me currently]

A good explanation, then, which for a qualitative researcher usually means a good case analysis, ties events, situations, and people together without making them lose their distinctiveness, their narrative richness, or reducing them to theoretical constructs, vague catchphrases, or statistical generalizations. As Stinchcombe (1978) argues, without the description we can never work out the deep consequential analogies that connect cases:

Far from it being the case that the most powerful general theorists ignore the details, the precise opposite is true. Social theory without attention to details is wind; the classes [categories] it invents are vacuous, and nothing interesting follows from the fact that A and B belong to the class. . . .

If conceptual profundity depends on the deep building of analogies from one case to
another, we are likely to find good theory in exactly the opposite place from where we have been taught to expect it. For it is likely to be those scholars who attempt to give a causal interpretation of a particular case who will be led to penetrate the deeper analogies between cases. (pp. 21-22)


[Nespor, 2011, Case-oriented analysis writings, pg 2-3]
*Italics added by me for emphasis

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