Misunderstanding No. 1 about Case Studies

Misunderstanding no. 1: General, theoretical knowledge is more valuable than concrete case knowledge

Correction No. 1: Predictive theories and universals cannot be found in the study of human affairs. Concrete case knowledge is therefore more valuable than the vain search for predictive theories and universals

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In order to understand why the conventional view of case-study research is problematic, we need to grasp the role of cases and theory in human learning. Here two points can be made. First, the case study produces the type of concrete, context-dependent knowledge which research on learning shows to be necessary to allow people to develop from rule-based beginners to virtuoso experts. Second, in the study of human affairs, there appears to exist only context-dependent knowledge, which thus presently rules out the possibility for social science to emulate natural science in developing epistemic theory, i.e., theory that is explanatory and predictive. The full argument behind these two points can be found in Flyvbjerg (2001, chapters 2-4). For reasons of space, I can only give an outline of the argument here. At the outset, however, we can assert that if the two points are correct, it will have radical consequences for the conventional view of the case study in research and teaching. This view would then be problematic.

 Phenomenological studies of human learning indicate that for adults there exists a qualitative leap in their learning process from the rule-governed use of analytical rationality in beginners to the fluid performance of tacit skills in what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) calls virtuosos and Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus (1986) true human experts. Here we may note that most people are experts in a number of everyday social, technical, and intellectual skills like giving a gift, riding a bicycle, or interpreting images on a television screen, while only few reach the level of true expertise for more specialized skills like playing chess, composing a symphony, or flying an airplane.

Common to all experts, however, is that they operate on the basis of intimate knowledge of several thousand concrete cases in their areas of expertise. Context-dependent knowledge and experience are at the very heart of expert activity. Such knowledge and expertise also lie at the center of the case study as a research and teaching method; or to put it more generally, still: as a method of learning. Phenomenological studies of the learning process therefore emphasize the importance of this and similar methods: it is only because of experience with cases that one can at all move from being a beginner to being an expert. If people were exclusively trained in context-independent knowledge and rules, that is, the kind of knowledge which forms the basis of textbooks, they would remain at the beginner’s level in the learning process. This is the limitation of analytical rationality: it is inadequate for the best results in the exercise of a profession, as student, researcher, or practitioner.

 In teaching situations, well chosen case studies can help students achieve competence, while context-independent facts and rules will bring students just to the beginner’s level. Only few institutions of higher learning have taken the consequence of this. Harvard University is one of them. Here both teaching and research in the professional schools are modelled to a wide extent on the understanding that case knowledge is central to human learning (Christensen and Hansen eds. 1987; Cragg 1940).

It is not that rule-based knowledge should be discounted: such knowledge is important in every area and especially to novices. But to make rule-based knowledge the highest goal of learning is topsy-turvy. There is a need for both approaches. The highest levels in the learning process, that is, virtuosity and true expertise, are reached only via a person’s own experiences as practitioner of the relevant skills. Therefore, beyond using the case method and other experiential methods for teaching, the best that teachers can do for students in professional programs is to help them achieve real practical experience; for example, via placement arrangements, internships, summer jobs, and the like.

For researchers, the closeness of the case study to real-life situations and its multiple wealth of details are important in two respects. First, it is important for the development of a nuanced view of reality, including the view that human behavior cannot be meaningfully understood as simply the rule-governed acts found at the lowest levels of the learning process, and in much theory. Second, cases are important for researchers’ own learning processes in developing the skills needed to do good research. If researchers wish to develop their own skills to a high level, then concrete, context-dependent experience is just as central for them as to professionals learning any other specific skills. Concrete experiences can be achieved via continued proximity to the studied reality and via feedback from those under study. Great distance to the object of study and lack of feedback easily lead to a stultified learning process, which in research can lead to ritual academic blind alleys, where the effect and usefulness of research becomes unclear and untested. As a research method, the case study can be an effective remedy against this tendency.

The second main point in connection with the learning process is that there does not and probably cannot exist predictive theory in social science. Social science has not succeeded in producing general, context-independent theory and has thus in the final instance nothing else to offer than concrete, context-dependent knowledge. And the case study is especially well suited to produce this knowledge. In his later work, Campbell (1975, 179) arrives at a similar conclusion. Earlier, Campbell (1966, 6-7) had been a fierce critic of the case study, stating that "such studies have such a total absence of control as to be of almost no scientific value." Now he explained that his work had undergone “an extreme oscillation away from my earlier dogmatic disparagement of case studies.” In a logic that in many ways resembles that of the phenomenology of human learning, Campbell explains:

"After all, man is, in his ordinary way, a very competent knower, and qualitative common-sense knowing is not replaced by quantitative knowing . . . This is not to say that such common sense naturalistic observation is objective, dependable, or unbiased. But it is all that we have. It is the only route to knowledge--noisy, fallible, and biased though it be" (1975, 179, 191).

 Campbell is not the only example of a researcher who has altered his views about the value of the case study. Hans Eysenck (1976, 9), who originally saw the case study as nothing more than a method of producing anecdotes, later realized that “sometimes we simply have to keep our eyes open and look carefully at individual cases--not in the hope of proving anything, but rather in the hope of learning something!” Final proof is hard to come by in social science because of the absence of “hard” theory, whereas learning is certainly possibly. More recently, similar views have been expressed by Charles Ragin, Howard Becker, and their colleagues in explorations of what the case study is and can be in social inquiry (Ragin and Becker 1992).

 As for predictive theory, universals, and scientism, so far social science has failed to deliver. In essence, we have only specific cases and context-dependent knowledge in social science. The first of the five misunderstandings about the case study--that general theoretical (context-independent) knowledge is more valuable than concrete (context-dependent) case knowledge--can therefore be revised as follows:

 Predictive theories and universals cannot be found in the study of human affairs. Concrete case knowledge is therefore more valuable than the vain search for predictive theories and universals.