Lecture 8 - Principles of Small-C Research Flashcards
Small-C Study
An intensive study of a single case or a small number of cases
- Single case study
- Comparative case study
Why not useful?
Small number of cases is likely to hamper ability to generalize from sample to population
Small number of cases also an extra complicationfor dealing with confounders (many potential confounders/few cases)
Better measurement
Quantitative measures can lack nuance
In-depth study of cases can enable richer measurement of difficult concepts, such as policy preferences, social identities, or understandings of concepts such as democracy
Uncovering hidden meanings of concepts
Causal Mechanisms
Inductive or deductive analysis of the processes driving causal effects using process tracing
Inductive Research
Intensive study of small set of cases may reveal new explanations not considered by previous research
New typologies of phenomena
Thick description
Detailed analysis of small number of cases enables putting human behavior into context
Establishing individuals’ motivations for action & their interpretations of the contexts driving their actions
Case selection
- Inferences from study sample to population
- Probaility sampling
- Total population sampling
- When only few cases are studied their selection becomes all the more important
Purposeful sampling
- Strategic case selection with research goal in mind
- Selecting cases that maximize the information gain
- Requires careful thinking about the objective(s) of a study, the nature of cases, and how they relate to the population
Typical case
Representative case! Hope is that descriptive findings are likely to generalize to the population as a whole/represent the population average.
One or multiple cases which represent a larger population well on important features
Goal is representativeness, facilitating inference to the population
Diverse cases
- Weakness of typical case technique: Populations often diverse, the typical case may not exist
- A descriptive study may also focus on several cases that, in combination, capture the diversity of a population
Inductive studies
- Exploratory search for new explanations for a phenomenon
- Common case selection techniques: Extreme cases, deviant cases, most similar cases, most different cases.
Testing of causal hypothesis
Does X cause change in Y?
Common case selection techniques: Crucial cases, most-similar cases, most-different cases
