Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [209]
363
This criticism was made also by James Caporoso in the American Political Science Review symposium. He is critical of Designing Social Inquiry’s tendency “to see falsification in terms of deriving many implications of a theory… we should consider which of our theories’ implications are least likely to be compatible with a particular outcome. Outcomes are overdetermined… . Instead of finding data that corresponds to theory, why not first ask which of the outcomes implied by the theory are least likely to be true if the theory is not true?” Caporoso, “Research Design, Falsification, and the Qualitative-Quantitative Divide,” p. 458. For a detailed statement of our views regarding ways of testing theories, see Chapters 6 and 11.
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King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, p. 31.
365
Ibid., p. 67.
366
Ibid., pp. 29-31; 123.
367
Ibid., p. 228.
368
Ibid., pp. 226-227.
369
Ibid., p. 228.
370
Sidney Tarrow, “Bridging the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide in Political Science,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 1995), p. 472; emphasis in original. It may be noted, however, that Designing Social Inquiry’s reference to Lisa Martin, Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992) does not mention that she recognized the importance of process-tracing and its contribution to her study. Designing Social Inquiry, p. 5. For a discussion of Martin’s study, see the Appendix, “Studies That Illustrate Research Design.”
371
On the meaning and importance attributed to a theory’s “leverage,” see King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, pp. 29-31.
372
Ibid., p. 31.
373
The confusion is illustrated by the following statement: “The fact that some dependent variables, and perhaps all interesting social science-dependent variables, are influenced by many causal factors does not make our definition of causality problematic.” Ibid., p. 89; emphasis supplied.
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The following discussion draws upon material presented in several previous papers and publications; also Ragin, The Comparative Method; George, “Case Studies and Theory Development”; George and McKeown, “Case Studies and Theories of Organizational Decision Making”; and George, “The Causal Nexus,” pp. 116-119.
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Collier, “The Comparative Method” p. 17.
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Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
377
We use Harry Eckstein’s categorization of ways in which a case study can contribute—in all stages, as he said—to theory development and testing.
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Stephen Van Evera suggests several other elaborations of the congruence method and discusses its usefulness for testing theory, creating theory, and inferring the antecedent conditions of a theory. We find it difficult to assess the utility of the two variants of the congruence approach he identifies and must await more research efforts to employ them. Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 58-63, 69-70, 72-74.
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Margaret Mooney Marini and Burton Singer, “Causality in the Social Sciences,” in Clifford Clogg, ed., Sociological