Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [186]
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In some instances, critiques of particular case studies have overstated the problems of representativeness and selection bias by assuming that these studies have purported to offer generalizations that cover broad populations, whereas in fact these studies carefully circumscribed their claims to apply them only to cases similar to those studied. Collier and Mahoney (“Insights and Pitfalls,” pp. 80-87) make this critique of Barbara Geddes’s review of case studies and selection bias (Barbara Geddes, “How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get: Selection Bias in Comparative Politics,” Political Analysis, Vol. 2 (1990), pp. 131-150).
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King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, pp. 108, 208-211.
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King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, pp. 208-211. A third potential problem DSI cites, the possibility of omitted variables or of some form of inherent probabilism, cannot be ruled out, regardless of methods, even when one has multiple observations.
DSI acknowledges that Harry Eckstein may also have intended for research designs of crucial, least-likely, and most-likely cases to use multiple observations from the same case to test alternative explanations (footnote, p. 210).
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Ronald Rogowski makes this point, citing works by Arend Lijphart, William Sheridan Allen, and Peter Alexis Gourevitch. (Ronald Rogowski, “The Role of Theory and Anomaly in Social-Scientific Inference,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 1995), pp. 467-468.
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George, “Case Studies and Theory Development,” pp. 19-23; and King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, p. 222.
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George, “Case Studies and Theory Development,” p. 21.
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King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, p. 222.
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George, “Case Studies and Theory Development,” p. 21; see also commentaries on the studies by Hugh Heclo and Stephen Stedman in the Appendix, “Studies That Illustrate Research Design.”
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Hugh Heclo, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974); Stephen John Stedman, Peacemaking in Civil War: International Mediation in Zimbabwe, 1974-1980 (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1991); and Jack S. Levy, “Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield,” International Organization, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring 1994), pp. 279-312. For a fuller discussion of the Heclo and Stedman studies, see the Appendix, “Studies That Illustrate Research Design.” See also Jack Levy, “Explaining Events and Developing Theories: History, Political Science, and the Analysis of International Relations,” in Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
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Bates et al., Analytic Narratives.
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These techniques of multi-method research are discussed more fully in Andrew Bennett, “Where the Model Frequently Meets the Road: Combining Statistical, Formal, and Case Study Methods,” presented at the American Political Science Association annual conference, Boston, Massachusetts, August 2002.
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Of course, many different research programs in the social sciences illustrate the complementary nature of formal, statistical, and qualitative methods. For an analysis of how these methods have contributed to research in comparative politics, for example, see David Laitin, “Comparative Politics: The State of the Subdiscipline,” in Ira Katznelson and Helen Milner, eds., Political Science: State of the Discipline (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 630-659.
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For a listing of these and related hypotheses and the authors who introduced them, see James Lee Ray, “A Lakatosian View of the Democratic Piece Research Program,” in Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, eds., Progress in International Relations