Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [36]
In the seminar, students first read the current description of the method. Then, each student selected a book of interest that consisted of a study of a single case or comparative cases. For this assignment each student employed the requirements of structured, focused comparison as a basis for critiquing the chosen book’s methodology. Students prepared written evaluations of the relevance and utility of the structured, focused method’s requirements for developing an incisive critique of their chosen book. Was the method useful for this purpose, and how might it be made more useful? After critiquing their chosen study in this way, students then consulted published reviews of that book to judge what their use of the structured, focused method had added. Generally, they found that use of structured, focused comparison added substantially to the published reviews. This assignment gave students useful hands-on experience with the method. It also contributed, together with classroom discussion, to the clarification and further development of the method.
For their second assignment, students prepared a research design on a problem they were considering as a possible topic for a Ph.D. dissertation. Students were asked to assess whether the five research design tasks (described below in Chapter 4) were helpful in preparing research designs for a possible dissertation, what problems they encountered, and what they had learned from the experience. Each student’s research design paper was discussed in the class and the writer of the paper then produced an addendum to his or her paper indicating what had been learned as a result of the discussion.
The modus operandi of the research seminar has been described in this note in order to indicate that the chapters that follow in Part II and Part III are the result of sustained efforts over a period of years to develop and refine the method of structured, focused comparison and related material in Parts Two and Three. Many students who took the seminar later drew upon that experience in their Ph.D. dissertations. The seminar became a required course at Stanford for all Ph.D. students in comparative politics and was taken by most Ph.D. students in international relations.
We emphasize in this book the critical importance of research designs. After a brief discussion of the essential components of the structured, focused method in Chapter 3, we discuss in Chapter 4, “Phase One: Designing Case Study Research,” five interrelated requirements for developing effective research design. This chapter should be used as a reference guide to be read not just once, but as often as necessary; first, in initial efforts to develop a research design and, then, as needed to redesign one’s research strategy to better approximate the desiderata set forth in the chapter. Readers planning to undertake case study research would be well advised to use the criteria for research design identified in that chapter to see how well they enable one to critique and build on existing publications of interest to them. In teaching these research seminars, we found it a quite useful first step to have students familiarize themselves with the challenge of good research design by applying these criteria as guidelines for reviewing existing studies.
Research design is an integral part of the method of structured, focused comparison. Readers should keep in mind, as emphasized in Chapter 4, that the guidelines for research design are intimately interrelated and must be integrated to produce an appropriate set of general questions to ask of each case in order to obtain the data needed to meet the study’s research objectives. “Appropriate