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Case Study Research and Applications : Sixth Edition
It is a privilege to provide the foreword for this fine book. It epitomizes a
research method for attempting valid inferences from events outside the
laboratory while at the same time retaining the goals of knowledge shared with
laboratory science.
More and more I have come to the conclusion that the core of the scientific
method is not experimentation per se but rather the strategy connoted by the
phrase “plausible rival hypotheses.” This strategy may start its puzzle solving
with evidence, or it may start with hypothesis. Rather than presenting this
hypothesis or evidence in the context-independent manner of positivistic
confirmation (or even of postpositivistic corroboration), it is presented instead in
extended networks of implications that (although never complete) are
nonetheless crucial to its scientific evaluation.
This strategy includes making explicit other implications of the hypotheses for
other available data and reporting how these fit. It also includes seeking out rival
explanations of the focal evidence and examining their plausibility. The
plausibility of these rivals is usually reduced by ramification extinction, that is,
by looking at their other implications on other data sets and seeing how well
these fit. How far these two potentially endless tasks are carried depends on the
scientific community of the time and what implications and plausible rival
hypotheses have been made explicit. It is on such bases that successful scientific
communities achieve effective consensus and cumulative achievements, without
ever reaching foundational proof. Yet, these characteristics of the successful
sciences were grossly neglected by the logical positivists and are underpracticed
by the social sciences, quantitative or qualitative.
Such checking by other implications and the ramification-extinction of rival
hypotheses also characterizes validity-seeking research in the humanities,
including the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Hirst, Habermas, and
current scholarship on the interpretation of ancient texts. Similarly, the strategy
is as available for a historian’s conjectures about a specific event as for a
scientist’s assertion of a causal law. It is tragic that major movements in the
social sciences are using the term hermeneutics to connote giving up on the goal
of validity and abandoning disputation as to who has got it right. Thus, in
addition to the quantitative and quasi-experimental case study approach that Yin
teaches, our social science methodological armamentarium also needs a
humanistic validity-seeking case study methodology that, although making no
use of quantification or tests of significance, would still work on the same
questions and share the same goals of knowledge.
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