Misunderstanding No. 5 about Case Studies

Misunderstanding no. 5: It is often difficult to summarize and develop general propositions and theories on the basis of specific case studies.

Correction no. 5: It is correct that summarizing case studies is often difficult, especially as concerns case process. It is less correct as regards case outcomes. The problems in summarizing case studies, however, are due more often to the properties of the reality studied than to the case study as a research method. Often it is not desirable to summarize and generalize case studies. Good studies should be read as narratives in their entirety.

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Case studies often contain a substantial element of narrative and one can get into quite a pickle talking about narrative in social science (for a good overview of narrative inquiry, see Chase and Landmann). After certain strands of discourse theory defined any text as narrative and everything as text, it seems that narrative is everything. But if something is everything, maybe it's nothing, and we're back to square one. It is difficult to avoid the subject of narrative, however, when considering the case study and qualitative research. In my own work, when I think about narrative, I don't think of discourse theory but of Miles Davis, the jazz icon. When asked how he kept writing classics through a four-decades-long career, he answered, "I first write a beginning, then a middle, and finally the ending." Narrative suggests questions about plot, i.e., a sequence of events and how they are related, and Davis set out the naked minimum. Obviously plots and narratives may be hatched in many ways. But if you write the kind of classic narrative that Davis talks about, with a beginning a middle and an end, you typically first try to catch the attention of the reader, often by means of a hook, i.e., a particularly captivating event or problematic that leads into the main story. You then present the issues and who are involved, including their relationships. Gradually, you reel in the reader to a point of no return, from where the main character--who in a case study need not be a person but could be, say, a community, a program, or a company--has no choice but to deal with the issues at hand, and in this sense is tested. At this stage, typically there is conflict and the conflict escalates. Finally, harmony is restored by the conflict being resolved, or at least explained, as may be the more modest achievement in a social science narrative.

To MacIntyre (1984, 214, 216), the human being is a “story-telling animal,” and the notion of a history is as fundamental a human notion as the notion of an action. Other observers have noted that narrative seems to exist in all human societies, modern and ancient, and that it is perhaps our most fundamental form for making sense of experience. (Novak 1975, 175; Mattingly 1991, 237; see also Abbott 1992, Arendt 1958, Carr 1986, Ricoeur 1984, Fehn et al. 1992, Rasmussen 1995, and Bal 1997). Narrative thus seems not only to be the creation of the story teller, but seems also to be an expression of innate relationships in the human mind, which we use to make sense of the world by constructing it as narrative.

The human propensity for narrative involves a danger, however, of what has been called the "narrative fallacy." The fallacy consists in a human inclination to simplify data and information through overinterpretation and through a preference for compact stories over complex datasets (Taleb 2007, 63). It is easier to remember and make decisions on the basis of "meaningful" stories than to remember strings of "meaningless" data. Thus we read meaning into data and make up stories, even where this is unwarranted. As a case in point, consider the inspirational accounts of how the internet led to a "new economy" where productivity had been disconnected from share prices. Or the fairy tale that increasing real estate prices is enough to sustain economic growth in a nation. Such stories are easy to understand and act on--for citizens, policy makers, and scholars--but they are fallacies and as such they are treacherous. In social science, the means to avoid the narrative fallacy is no different from the means to avoid other error: the usual systematic checks for validity and reliability in how data are collected and used.

Dense narratives based on thick description will provide some protection against the narrative fallacy. Such narratives typically approach the complexities and contradictions of real life. Accordingly, they may be difficult or impossible to summarize into neat formulae, general propositions, and theories (Benhabib 1990, Rouse 1990, Roth 1989, White 1990, Mitchell and Charmaz 1996). This tends to be seen by critics of the case study as a drawback. To the case-study researcher, however, a particularly “thick” and hard-to-summarize narrative is not a problem. Rather, it is often a sign that the study has uncovered a particularly rich problematic. The question, therefore, is whether the summarizing and generalization, which the critics see as an ideal, is always desirable. Nietzsche (1974, 335 [§ 373]) is clear in his answer to this question. “Above all,” he says about doing science, “one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity” (emphasis in original).

Lisa Peattie (2001, 260) explicitly warns against summarizing dense case studies: “It is simply that the very value of the case study, the contextual and interpenetrating nature of forces, is lost when one tries to sum up in large and mutually exclusive concepts.” The dense case study, according to Peattie, is more useful for the practitioner and more interesting for social theory than either factual “findings” or the high-level generalizations of theory.

Dense narratives based on thick description will provide some protection against the narrative fallacy.

The opposite of summing up and “closing” a case study is to keep it open. Two strategies work particularly well in ensuring openness. First, when writing up their case studies, authors may demur from the role of omniscient narrator and summarizer. Instead, they may choose to tell the story in its diversity, allowing the story to unfold from the many-sided, complex, and sometimes conflicting stories that the actors in the case have told researchers. Second, authors of case studies may avoid linking their study with the theories of any one academic specialization. Instead they may choose to relate the case to broader philosophical positions that cut across specializations. In this way authors leave scope for readers of different backgrounds to make different interpretations and draw diverse conclusions regarding the question of what the case is a case of. The goal is not to make the case study be all things to all people. The goal is to allow the study to be different things to different people. Here it is useful to describe the case with so many facets--like life itself--that different readers may be attracted, or repelled, by different things in the case. Readers are not pointed down any one theoretical path or given the impression that truth might lie at the end of such a path. Readers will have to discover their own path and truth inside the case. Thus, in addition to the interpretations of case actors and case narrators, readers are invited to decide the meaning of the case and to interrogate actors' and narrators' interpretations in order to answer that categorical question of any case study: “What is this case a case of?”

Case stories written like this can neither be briefly recounted nor summarized in a few bullet points. The case story is itself the result. It is a “virtual reality,” so to speak. For the reader willing to enter this reality and explore it inside and out the payback is meant to be a sensitivity to the issues at hand that cannot be obtained from theory. Students can safely be let loose in this kind of reality, which provides a useful training ground with insights into real-life practices that text-book teaching often does not provide.

If we return again briefly to the phenomenology for human learning (see Misunderstanding No. 1) we may understand why summarizing case studies is not always useful and may sometimes be counterproductive. Knowledge at the beginner’s level consists precisely in the reduced formulas which characterize theories, while true expertise is based on intimate experience with thousands of individual cases and on the ability to discriminate between situations, with all their nuances of difference, without distilling them into formulas or standard cases. The problem is analogous to the inability of computer-based expert systems to approach the level of virtuoso human experts, even when the systems are compared with the experts who have conceived the rules upon which these systems operate. This is because the experts do not use rules but operate on the basis of detailed case-experience. This is real expertise. The rules for expert systems are formulated only because the systems require it; rules are characteristic of expert systems, but not of real human experts.

In the same way, one might say that the rule formulation which takes place when researchers summarize their work into theories is characteristic of the culture of research, of researchers, and of theoretical activity, but such rules are not necessarily part of the studied reality constituted by Bourdieu’s (1977, 8, 15) “virtuoso social actors.” Something essential may be lost by this summarizing--namely the possibility to understand virtuoso social acting, which, as Bourdieu has shown, cannot be distilled into theoretical formulae--and it is precisely their fear of losing this “something,” which makes case researchers cautious about summarizing their studies. Case researchers thus tend to be skeptical about erasing phenomenological detail in favor of conceptual closure.

Ludwig Wittgenstein shared this skepticism. According to Gasking and Jackson, Wittgenstein used the following metaphor when he described his use of the case study approach in philosophy:

"In teaching you philosophy I’m like a guide showing you how to find your way round London. I have to take you through the city from north to south, from east to west, from Euston to the embankment and from Piccadilly to the Marble Arch. After I have taken you many journeys through the city, in all sorts of directions, we shall have passed through any given street a number of times--each time traversing the street as part of a different journey. At the end of this you will know London; you will be able to find your way about like a born Londoner. Of course, a good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I’m a rather bad guide" (1967, 51).

This approach implies exploring phenomena firsthand instead of reading maps of them. Actual practices are studied before their rules, and one is not satisfied by learning only about those parts of practices that are open to public scrutiny; what Erving Goffman (1963) calls the “backstage” of social phenomena must be investigated, too, like the side streets which Wittgenstein talks about.

When a good narrative is over it should be unthinkable for a bystander to say, ‘So what’?

With respect to intervention in social and political affairs, Abbott (1992, 79) has rightly observed that a social science expressed in terms of typical case narratives would provide “far better access for policy intervention than the present social science of variables.” MacIntyre (1984, 216) similarly says, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” In a similar vein, Mattingly (1991, 237) points out that narratives not only give meaningful form to experiences we have already lived through. They also provide us a forward glance, helping us to anticipate situations even before we encounter them, allowing us to envision alternative futures. Narrative inquiries do not--indeed, cannot--start from explicit theoretical assumptions. Instead, they begin with an interest in a particular phenomenon that is best understood narratively. Narrative inquiries then develop descriptions and interpretations of the phenomenon from the perspective of participants, researchers, and others.

Labov (1966, 37-9) writes that when a good narrative is over “it should be unthinkable for a bystander to say, ‘So what’?” Every good narrator is continually warding off this question. A narrative that lacks a moral that can be independently and briefly stated, is not necessarily pointless. And a narrative is not successful just because it allows a brief moral. A successful narrative does not allow the question to be raised at all. The narrative has already supplied the answer before the question is asked. The narrative itself is the answer (Nehamas 1985, 163-64).

A reformulation of the fifth misunderstanding, which states that it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies into general propositions and theories, thus reads as follows:

It is correct that summarizing case studies is often difficult, especially as concerns case process. It is less correct as regards case outcomes. The problems in summarizing case studies, however, are due more often to the properties of the reality studied than to the case study as a research method. Often it is not desirable to summarize and generalize case studies. Good studies should be read as narratives in their entirety.

It must again be emphasized, however, that despite the difficulty or undesirability in summarizing certain case studies, the case study as such can and do contribute to the cumulative development of knowledge, as argued under Misunderstandings Nos. 2 and 3.