Abstract
My guess is that the authors of these two books would thoroughly disagree with each other on a number of points, although by title their books are so alike. I have not applied the constant comparative method rigorously in my reading of the two books, but the two main differences between the books are in their analytical perspective on case study research and in their style of communicating.
The book by Yves-Chantal Gagnon, The Case Study as Research Method: A Practical Handbook, has a very clearly stated aim:
The purpose of this handbook is, precisely, to give researchers a tool to help them make an informed decision on whether the case method is appropriate and, if it is, to provide them with a guide to help them conduct the study with the required degree of rigour. (p. xi, foreword)
The chapter titles of the book reflect this aim, and the chapters are not called chapters but stages in the choice and conduct of a case study. Thus, the chapters or stages have the following headlines: Assessing appropriateness and usefulness, Ensuring accuracy of results, Preparation, Selecting cases, Collecting data, Analysing data, Interpreting data, and Reporting results. These headlines all signal recognisable analytical parts of qualitative empirical research process in case studies that makes good sense to most students and researchers, even though they would perhaps have chosen different terms here and there. The stages are elaborated upon in short form at the end of the introduction, which gives a nice structured overview of the content of the different research process stages, because each stage is here described as a list of steps and related objectives. In the actual chapters, all the steps are illustrated with short examples from the author’s own research in the behaviour of business executives during processes of introducing new technologies in their organisations, since this study serves as a recurrent example throughout the book.
The book lives up to its promises and delivers well-structured and well-argued hands-on advice with a lot of sensible methodological check-points under way. This clear structure of the book enables different readers to easily use it for different purposes. Readers can agree with and use the methodological points in favour of their own analytical argumentation about their case study research. Readers can also disagree with some of the methodological points and then remember to address such points as potential objections to their own analytical argumentation about their case study research. I mention this because the author argues a relatively standard or traditional view on qualitative research methods in relation to case studies. In the book, it is argued that the strength of case studies is the in-depth analysis of phenomena in context, the ability to analyse historical developments, and the high degree of internal validity and authentic representations in the empirical analysis. The use of the term ‘authentic’ taken apart, many qualitative researchers would agree to such arguments. But it is in the listing of the weaknesses of case studies that a traditional view of social science seems to appear more explicitly. Here, external validity, lack of capacity to generalise and the necessity of adding quantitative methods suggest the existence of the epistemological inferiority complex of qualitative case studies vis-à-vis quantitatively based studies.
Another sign of this traditional view is the apparent ‘one correct way of doing it’ perspective in several of the stages. In the stage called preparation, the researcher chooses only between single- or multiple-case study, and not, for example, between case studies with different purposes (e.g., exploratory and explanatory). In the stage called analysis, only one strategy is suggested on top of coding, namely content analysis, and the readers are not supplied with different suggestions suitable for different research purposes.
The book by Gary Thomas, How to Do Your Case Study: A Guide for Students & Researchers is a very different book, although it is also clearly structured, communicates a specific view of qualitative research, and certainly covers a lot of hands-on advice for operative methodological processes involved in doing case study research. This book seems to have several aims where one of them is to give advice on how best to perform a case study inquiry. But another aim is to demonstrate the variety of ways of conducting case studies and the cross-disciplinary applicability of using case study research. The rich uses of many longer examples from different disciplines sustain this aim, although the main focus is on applied social sciences and humanities. The content of the book is divided into 12 chapters, falling into 3 parts: ‘Getting your bearings’, ‘Getting down to doing it’ and ‘Getting on with it and finishing’. All the chapters are how-to-do chapters, except for Chapter 3 which is about models of the whole, where context is theorised from different angles, and Chapter 12 which is about generalisation and different epistemological ways of inferring and concluding. I would add that chapter 1 is also a more theoretical chapter where, for example, case study research is compared to other forms of scientific inquiry and a theoretically informed definition is presented:
Case studies are analyses of persons, events, decisions, periods, projects, policies, institutions or other systems which are studied holistically by one or more methods. The case that is the subject of the inquiry will be an instance of a class of phenomena that provides an analytical frame – an object – within which the study is conducted and which the case illuminates and explicates. (p. 23)
All the chapters are clearly structured but with an eye for presenting variations of research designs, purposes, approaches, inquiry processes, data collections and tools for analysis across applied social sciences and humanities. The chapters are written in a lively, engaged and personal manner – though highly academic and structured in their argumentation at the same time – and as a nice student-friendly communicative feature, each chapter finishes with a short section entitled, ‘If you take only one thing from this chapter, take this…
The book can be placed in a kind of middle position in a continuum of qualitative methods publications between on the one hand concrete practical hands-on recommendations and on the other hand abstract theoretical arguments about epistemology and other theory of science issues and principles. Gary Thomas’ book contains sufficient amounts of hands-on advice with generous and varied empirical examples in order to work as a guide for students, but it also covers sufficient theoretical grounds in order to require analytical reflection of students (and not just instrumental use) and in order to become interesting as discussion partners for researchers who do case studies. Thus, the analytical perspective in this book - compared to the book by Yves-Chantal Gagnon – seems to be much more informed by recent epistemological debates about various qualitative methodology issues, such as the concept of scientific knowledge itself and the debate about whether generalisation on the basis of case studies is possible and desirable. Even for an experienced qualitative methods researcher, this book is good to think with.
However, there is one element of Gary Thomas’ book that particularly calls for methodological debate, in my opinion. This is his strong opposition against generalising on the basis of case studies (and presumably other studies using qualitative methods). The backbone of his argumentation seems to be an understanding of generalisation as being equal to representative quantitative generalisation, driven by a combination of an inductive research strategy and a group of rigid rules of inference. This understanding of generalisation is one point which the two books about case studies have in common, and which is why Yves-Chantal Gagnon also argues against generalising from case studies and recommends the inclusion of quantitative methods.
I would argue that there are different ways of generalising, for example analytical generalisation where the complex qualitative patterns of categories and processes are unique and typical at the same time (Delmar, 2010), thus such patterns can be generalised by the help of theoretical concepts that express the typical in the unique (Kvale, 1996). I would also argue that analytical generalisation is never universalising, but a much more specific and context-bound kind of typicality (Halkier, in press). In Chapter 12, where Gary Thomas writes about using abduction instead of generalisation and using phronesis instead of theory, he associates abduction with ‘particular kinds of looser generalisation’ and describes methodological processes very similar to existing definitions of analytical generalisation regarding the particular, the variability and the context-bound. Hence, it seems to me that Thomas agrees with the methodological procedures of performing some sort of analytical generalisation on the basis of empirical case study data-patterns, but that it is the use of the term generalisation that he opposes in case study research. It seems to be the same issue with other methodological terms, such as ‘sampling’ and ‘validity’, where the processes of thinking about selection and case, and the processes of ensuring scientific quality are presented systematically, but must not be called sampling and validity. I will only encourage qualitative methodology researchers to stop the fighting over terms and to engage constructively in either explicitly re-defining existing terms differently or constructing alternative and more appropriate terms. To try to avoid issues by avoiding the use of specific terms only contributes to making qualitative designs such as case studies more vulnerable in an increasingly cross-disciplinary world.
Having said that, I can recommend qualitatively working students and researchers to use Gagnon’s book for check-points, either to bolster one’s own argumentation or as a reminder that potential objections to one’s own argumentation must be addressed. And I can recommend Thomas’ book as an inspiring and systematic companion to think and discuss with, where there is tolerance towards the wonderful variability of doing qualitative research.