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The Case Study Method in Social Inquiry1

ROBERT E. STAKE University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

It is widely believed that case studies are useful in the study of human affairs because they are down-to-earth and attention-holding but that they are not a suitable basis for generalization. In this paper, I claim that case studies will often be the preferred method of re- search because they may be epistemo- logically in harmony with the reader's experience and thus to that person a natural basis for generalization.

Experience. We expect an inquiry to be carried out so that certain audiences will benefit — not just to swell the archives, but to help persons toward further understandings. If the readers of our reports are the persons who popu- late our houses, schools, governments, and industries; and if we are to help them understand social problems and social programs, we must perceive and communicate (see Bohm, 1974; Schon, 1977) in a way that accommodates their present understandings.2 Those people have arrived at their understandings mostly through direct and vicarious ex- perience.

And those readers who are most learned and specialized in their disci- plines are little different. Though they write and talk with special languages, their own understandings of human af- fairs are for the most part attained and

amended through personal experience. I believe that it is reasonable to con- clude that one of the more effective means of adding to understanding for all readers will be by approximating through the words and illustrations of our reports, the natural experience ac- quired in ordinary personal involve- ment.

At the turn of the century, German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1910) claimed that more objective and "sci- entific" studies did not do the best job of acquainting man with himself.

Only from his actions, his fixed ut- terances, his effects upon others, can man learn about himself; thus he learns to know himself only by the round-about way of understanding. What we once were, how we de- veloped and became what we are, we learn from the way in which we acted, the plans which we once adopted, the way in which we made ourselves felt in our vocation, from old dead letters, from judgments on which were spoken long ago.. '. .we understand ourselves and others only when we transfer our own lived ex- perience into every kind of expres- sion of our own and other people's lives.

He distinguished between the human studies and other kinds of studies.

The human studies are thus founded on this relation between lived experi- ence, expression, and' understand- ing. Here for the first time we reach a quite clear criterion by which the de- limitation of the human studies can be definitively carried out. A study belongs to the human studies only if its object becomes accessible to us through the attitude which is founded on the relation between life, expres- sion, and understanding.

Dilthey was not urging us merely to pay more attention to humanistic values or to put more affective variables into our equations. He was saying that our methods of studying human affairs need to capitalize upon the natural powers of people to experience and un- derstand.

Knowledge. In statements funda- mental to the epistemology of social inquiry, Polanyi3 distinguished be- tween propositional and tacit knowl- edge. Propositional knowledge — the knowledge of both reason and gossip — was seen to be composed of all in- terpersonally sharable statements, most of which for most people are observa- tions of objects and events. Tacit knowledge may also dwell on objects and events, but it is knowledge gained from experience with them, experience with propositions about them, and rumination.

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Through reason man observes him- self;-but he knows himself only through consciousness. (Tolstoy, War and Peace)

Tacit knowledge is all that is remem- bered somehow, minus that which is remembered in the form of words, symbols, or other rhetorical forms. It is that which permits us to recognize faces, to comprehend metaphors, and to "know ourselves.'' Tacit knowledge includes a multitude of unexpressible associations which give rise to new meanings, new ideas, and new applica- tions of the old. Polanyi recognized that each person, expert or novice, has great stores of tacit knowledge with which to build new understandings.

It is a common belief that these ordi- nary understandings, both new and old, are merely the pieces from which mighty explanations are made. And that explanation is the grandest of un- derstandings. But explanation and un- derstanding are perhaps not so inti- mately interwoven.

Practically every explanation, be it causal or teleological or of some other kind, can be said to further our understanding, of things. But "un- derstanding ".-also has a psychologi- cal ring which "explanation" has not. This psychological feature was emphasized by several of the nineteenth-century antipositivist methodologists, perhaps most force- fully by Simmel who thought that understanding as a method charac- teristic of the humanities is a form of empathy or re-creation in the mind of the scholar of the mental atmosphere, the thoughts and feelings and motiva- tions, of the objects of his study. . . . Understanding is also connected with intentionality in a way that ex- planation is not. One understands the aims and purposes of an agent, the meaning of a sign or symbol, and the significance of a social institution or religious rite. This intentionalistic . . . dimension of understanding has

- come to play a prominent role in more recent methodological discus- sion. (Von Wright, 1971)

Explanation belongs more to proposi- tional knowledge, understanding more to tacit.

Philosophers of the positivist school, Carl Hempel and Karl Popper particu-

larly, have posited that propositional statements of lawful relationship are the closest approximations of Truth — whether we are talking about physical matter or human. They would have us speak of attributes and constructs, such as energy and mass or work-ethic and masculinity, and the relationships among them. Antipositivists such as Dilthey, Von Wright, and William Dray have claimed that Truth in the fields of human affairs is better approx- imated by statements that are rich with the sense of human encounter: To speak not of underlying attributes, objective observables, and universal forces, but of perceptions and understanding that come from immersion in and holistic regard for the phenomena.

In American research circles most methodologists have been of positivis- tic persuasion. The more episodic, sub- jective procedures, common to the case study, have been considered weaker than the experimental or correlational studies for explaining things.

When explanation, propositional knowledge, and law are the aims of an inquiry, the case study will often be at a disadvantage. When the aims are un- derstanding, extension of experience, and increase in conviction in that which is known, the disadvantage disappears.

Generalizations. The scientist and the humanist scholar alike search for laws that tell of order in their disci- plines. But so do all other persons look. for, regularity and system in their ex- perience. Predictable covariation is to be found in all phenomena. In 1620 Francis Bacon said:

There are and can be only two ways of searching and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general ax- ioms. . . this is now the fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it ar- rives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.

He claimed that Truth lies in the most general of axioms, a far and labored trek from experience.4

Another point of view holds that Truth lies in particulars. William Blake offered these intemperate words:

To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the lone distinction of merit. General knowledges are those that idiots possess.

Generalization may not be all that de- spicable, but particularization does de- serve praise. To know particulars fleet- ingly of course is to know next to noth- ing. What becomes useful understand- ing is a full and thorough knowledge of the particular, recognizing it also in new and foreign contexts.

That knowledge is a form of generalization too, not scientific induc- tion but naturalistic generalization, arrived at by recognizing the similarities of objects and issues in and out of context and by sensing the natural covariations of happenings. To generalize this way is to be both intui- tive and empirical, and not idiotic.

Naturalistic generalizations develop within a person as a product of experi- ence. They derive from the tacit knowl- edge of how things are, why they are, how people feel about them, and how these things are likely to be later or in other places with which this person is familiar. They seldom take the form of predictions but lead regularly to expec- tation. They guide action, in fact they are inseparable from action (Kemmis, 1974). These generalizations may be- come verbalized, passing of course from tacit knowledge to propositional; but they have not yet passed the empiri- cal and logical tests that characterize formal (scholarly, scientific) generali- zations.

Sociologist Howard Becker5 spoke of an irreducible conflict between sociological perspective and the per- spective of everyday life. Which is superior? It depends on the circum- stance, of course. For publishing in the sociological journals, the scientific perspective is better; but for reporting to lay audiences and for studying lay problems, the lay perspective will often be superior. And frequently that everyday-life perspective will be superior for discourse among scholars for they too often share among them- selves more of ordinary experience than of special conceptualization. The special is often too special. It is foolish to presume that a more scholarly report will be the more effective.

The other generalizations, i.e., rationalistic, propositional, law-like generalizations, can be useful for un- derstanding a particular situation. And they can be hurtful. Obviously, bad laws foster misunderstandings. And abstract statements of law distract at- tention from direct experience. Good generalizations aid the understanding

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of general conditions, but good generalizations can lead one to see phenomena more simplistically than one should.

I t is the legitimate aim of many scho- larly studies to discover or validate laws. But the aim of the practical arts is to get things done. The better generali- zations often are those more parochial, those more personal. In fields such as education and social work, where few laws have been validated and where

. inquiry can be directed toward gather- ing information that has use other than for the cultivation of laws, a persistent attention to laws is pedantic.

Cases. The object (target) of a social inquiry is seldom an individual person or enterprise. Unfortunately, it is such single objects that are usually thought of as "cases." A case is often thought of as a constituent member of a target population. And since single members poorly represent whole populations, the case study is seen to be a poor basis for generalization.

Often, however, the situation is one in which there is need for generaliza- tion about that particular case or generalization to a similar case rather than generalization to a population of cases. Then the demands for typicality and representativeness yield to needs for assurance that the target case is properly described. As readers recog- nize essential similarities to cases of interest to them, they establish the basis for naturalistic generalization.

The case need not be a person or enterprise. It can be whatever "bounded system" (to use Louis Smith's term) is of interest. An institu- tion, a program, a responsibility, a col- lection, or a population can be the case. This is not to trivialize the notion of "case" but to note the generality of the case study method in preparation for noting its distinctiveness.

It is distinctive in the first place by giving great prominence to what is and what is not "the case" — the bound- aries are kept in focus. What is happen- ing and deemed important within those boundaries (the emic) is considered vital and usually determines what the study is about, as contrasted with other kinds of studies where hypotheses or issues previously targeted by the inves- tigators (the etic) usually determine the content of the study.

Case studies can be used to test hypotheses, particularly to examine a single exception that shows the hypothesis to be false. Case studies can be highly statistical; institutional re- search and vocational counseling case studies often are. But in the social sci- ence literature, most case studies fea- ture: descriptions that are complex, holistic, and involving a myriad of not highly isolated variables;, data that are likely to be gathered at least partly by personalistic observation; and a writing style that is informal, perhaps narra- tive, possibly with verbatim quotation, illustration, and even allusion and metaphor. Comparisons are implicit rather than explicit. Themes and hypotheses may be important, but they remain subordinate to the understand- ing of the case.6

Although case studies have been used by anthropologists, psychoana- lysts, and many others as a method of exploration preliminary to theory development,7 the characteristics of the method are usually more suited to ex- pansionist than reductionist pursuits. Theory building is the search for es- sences, pervasive and determining in- gredients, and the makings of laws. The case study, however, proliferates rather than narrows. One is left with more to pay attention to rather than less. The case study attends to the idiosyncratic more than to the pervasive.8 The fact that it has been useful in theory building does not mean that that is its best use.

Its best use appears to me to be for adding to existing experience and humanistic understanding. Its charac- teristics match the "readinesses" peo- ple have for added experience. As Von Wright and others stressed, intentional- ity and empathy are central to the com- prehension of social problems, but so also is information that is holistic and episodic. The discourse of persons struggling to increase their understand- ing of social matters features and so- licits these qualities. And these qual- ities match nicely the characteristics of the case study.9

The study of human problems is the work of scientists, novelists, jour- nalists, everybody of course — but especially historians. The historian Howard Butterfield (1951) recognized the centrality of experiential data and said:

. . . the only understanding we ever reach in history is but a refinement,

more or less subtle and sensitive, of the difficult—and sometimes decep- tive — process of imagining oneself in another person's place.

Case studies are likely to continue to be popular because of their style and to be useful for exploration for those who search for explanatory laws. And, moreover, because of the universality and importance of experiential under- standing, and because of their com- patability with such understanding, case studies can be expected to con- tinue to have an epistemological advan- tage over other inquiry methods as a basis for naturalistic generalization. Unlike Bacon's "true way" of discov- ering Truth, this method has been tried and found to be a direct and satisfying way of adding to experience and im- proving understanding.

Notes 1Written at the Centre for Applied Research in

Education, University of East Anglia, as part of an assignment for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris.

2 In this paper I am writing about the formal inquiry to be done by people, on or off the cam- pus, who are subject to greater rewards for scho- larly work and knowledge production and to less- er rewards for professional support and problem solving. In the USA there are few civil service or applied research agencies which validate their inquiries according to its service value more than to its "internal and external validities," as de- fined by Campbell and Stanley (1966). I see it as unfortunately necessary to overstate the distinc- tion between academic research and practical in- quiry as a step toward improving and legitimizing inquiries that are needed for understanding and problem solving but which are unlikely to pro- duce vouchsafed generalizations.

3I am indebted to statements by Harry Broudy (1972) and Andrew Ortony (1975) for helping me understand the educational relevance of the writ- ing of Polanyi.

4But he noted that at least before 1620 that was not the way humans reached understanding.

5Howard Becker(1964). Important ideas about the special use of case study as precursor to theoretical study are found in his "Problems of Inference and Proof in Participant Observation," (1958).

6This is not to say that all case studies are as described here. Medical "write-ups" for exam- ple are very different. But these characteristics are commonly expected and little different than those specified by Louis Smith (1973), for exam- ple, to be: credible, holistic, particularistic, indi- vidualizable, process-oriented, ego-involving, and blending of behavioral and phenomenologi- cal methodologies.

7In Julian Simon, (1969), for example. 8Barry Mac Donald and Rob Walker have made

the strongest case I know for using idiosyncratic instances to create understanding of more general matters, as in "Case Study and the Social Philosophy of Educational Research" (1975).

9 It would be of interest to get empirical data on the perceived utility of case studies. It can be

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presumed, I fear, that some respondents, having heard objections to the case study method from such authorities as Julian Stanley and Donald Campbell and thinking more of political value than informational value, would underrate their utility for understanding and generalization.

References

Bacon, Sir Frances. Novum Organum. 1620. Becker, Howard S. Problems in the publica-

tion Held studies. In Arthur J. Vidich, Joseph Bensman, and Maurice R. Stein (Eds.) Reflections on Community Studies. New York: John Wiley, 1964, p. 273.

Becker, Howard S. Problems of inference and proof in participant observation. American Sociological Review, 1958, 59, 652-660.

Blake, William. Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynold's "Disclosures" 1808.

Bohm, David. Science as perception — com- munication. In F. Suppe (Ed.), The Structure of Scientific Theories. Urbana: Univ. III. Press, 1974.

Broudy, Harry S. The life uses of schooling as a field for research. In L. G. Thomas (Ed.), Philosophical redirection of educational re- search. 71st Yearbook of NSSE, Part I, Chapter DC, 1972.

Butterfield, Sir Herbert. History and human relations. London: Collins, 1951..

Campbell, Donald T., and Stanley, Julian C. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966.

Dilthey, Wilhelm. The construction of the his- torical world of the human studies (Der Auf- bauder Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. 1910) Gesammelte Schriften I-VII Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1914-1927.

Dray, William H. Laws and explanation in history. Oxford Univ. Press, 1957.

Ham pel, Carl G. The function of general laws in history. Journal of Philosophy, 39, 1942.

Kemmis, Stephen. An ecological perspective on innovation. Urbana: Univ. of III. College of Education, 1974. (mimeo) . Mac Donald, Barry, and Walker, Rob. Case

study and the social philosophy of educational

research. Cambridge Journal of Education, 5, No. 1, 1975.

Ortony, Andrew. Knowledge, language and thinking. Urbana: Univ. of III. College of Educa- tion, 1975. (mimeo)

Polanyi, Michael. Personal knowledge. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.

Popper, Karl. The poverty of historicism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957.

Schon, Donald A. Metaphor and the social conscience. Paper delivered at the Conference on Metaphor and Thought, Univ. of III., September 1977.

Simon, Julian L. Basic research methods in social science: The art of empirical investigation. New York: Random House, 1969.

Smith, Louis. An aesthetic education work- shop for administrators: Some implications for a theory of case studies. Paper presented at AERA Chicago, 1974.

Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. 1869. Von Wright, Georg Henrik. Explanation and

understanding. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.

Research for Action1

GERARD PIEL Publisher, Scientific American

I n the pecking order of academia, pure research out-ranks applied. Re- search into education must fall, there- fore, into the second or lower class. Not a discipline in its own right — I hope, at least, it does not pretend to such status — education research is the object of the attentions of the established disci- plines: psychology in all its varieties, sociology, anthropology, demography, statistics and, nowadays, economics. Because our universities are depart- mentalized by discipline and the scholar's career in each department turns on contribution to its parochial interests, it is not surprising that much education research is addressed to the archives of the disciplines and not to the improvement of education.

The notion that there are two ways to do science, and the unequal distribution of rewards between them, thus together work a disservice to education and,

more often than not, to the disciplines as well. This outcome we must deplore. Education is the route to salvation for a secular society. It should be carried on with deeper understanding and with nagging concern for its improvement. To this end there is but one way to do research, and that is to do it well.

Having now used the value-laden word "well," I must declare my bias. I should do so because, in addition, I shall comment here about the biases of others. My romance is with education in the 18th Century sense of this enter- prise. By education, society promotes the perfectibility of the individual. It is the mission of our schools not to shape the citizen to the uses of society, but to nurture citizens capable of shaping soc- iety to better purposes. My test of the worth of a piece of education research, therefore, is whether it promotes or hinders that enterprise. If it is done well • by that criterion, then research for ac-

tion will also, by definition, pass mus- ter in the discipline that has been brought to bear upon the illumination and improvement of education.

It is difficult to do social science well, whether pure or applied, in a cul- ture as dominated as ours is by the pragmatic successes of the natural sci- ences. The social sciences did not re- tain for long the innocent confidence with which they were launched in the 19th Century by Auguste Comte. The Founder placed them at the pinnacle of the scientific endeavor. In our country, social scientists began to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences only a little more than a decade ago; they are still defending their status as scientists.

The second class citizenship of so- cial scientists causes them to try to make social research look as much as possible like the work of the physical and biological sciences. The extreme case is given by the distinguished

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