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Case Studies: One Observation or Many? Justification or Discovery?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mary S. Morgan
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Abstract

Critiques of case studies as an epistemic genre usually focus on the domain of justification and hinge on comparisons with statistics and laboratory experiments. In this domain, case studies can be defended by the notion of “infirming”: they use many different bits of evidence, each of which may independently “infirm” the account. Yet their efficacy may be more powerful in the domain of discovery, in which these same different bits of evidence must be fully integrated to create an explanatory account with internal validity.

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Type
Case Studies
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Philosophy of Science , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 2012 , pp. 667 - 677
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Thanks to the British Academy and Wolfson Foundation for funding my research project, “Re-thinking Case Studies across the Social Sciences,” and supporting the conference “Reasoning with Cases in the Social Sciences” (along with the Center for Philosophy of Science) at the University of Pittsburgh in November 2011. I thank participants at that meeting and the PSA 2010 symposium, especially Sharon Crasnow, Rachel Ankeny, and Carlo Gabbani, for their comments.

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