Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

90 D. Bridges
6.7 The Case as Offering a Vicarious Experience
Experimental research “guarantees” the veracity of its generalisations by reference to formal
theories and hands them intact to the reader; case study research offers a surrogate
experience and invites the reader to underwrite the account, by appealing to his tacit knowledge
of human situations. The truths contained in a successful case study report, like those
in literature, are “guaranteed” by “the shock of recognition”. (Adelman et al., 1980, p. 143)
Adelman et al. were here echoing, in particular, the views of Stake (who was
a participant in the conference from which their paper emerged). There are four
elements to this argument, which it may be helpful to distinguish.
First, there is a claim about what case studies can offer in the form of vicarious
experience:
One of the more effective means of adding to understanding – for all readers – will be
by approximating through the words and illustration of our reports the natural experience
attained in ordinary personal involvements. (Stake, 1980, p. 65)
Certain descriptions and assertions are assimilated by readers into memory. When the
researcher’s narrative provides opportunity for vicarious experience, readers extend their
memories of happenings. Naturalistic, ethnographic case materials, to some extent, parallel
actual experience, feeding into the most fundamental processes of awareness and
understanding. (Stake, 1994, p. 240)
Second, there is a view about how such vicarious experience engages with human
understanding: extending their memories of happenings, entering their tacit understanding.
In a sense, then, the argument rests on a theory about how practitioners
and policy-makers learn (come to extend their understanding) rather more than an
epistemological theory about what authority can be claimed for what they learn.
Kemmis does indeed make a direct connection with such learning theory when he
writes:
In Piaget’s terminology, the reader must be able to assimilate the situation-as-reported to
his present experience and accommodate the present forms of experience to the new forms
of possible experience offered by the report. It is in this sense that case study often works
by Verstehen (empathetic understanding) feeding imagination and experience as much as
propositional knowledge in discourse. (Kemmis, 1980, p. 128)
By extension Adelman et al. suggest that there is a particular pedagogy attached
to the use of case study “which teaches by example rather than precept” (Adelman
et al., 1980, p. 142).
Third, and perhaps more controversially, contributors like Stenhouse and Stake
have tried to address the claims of natural sciences to the predictive power of their
hypotheses, though their language shifts from “prediction” to “expectation” and
“anticipation”:
The responsive diagnostic predictions which interplay with action may be called anticipations.
Surprise in a phenomenology of understanding is equivalent to falsification in
scientific theory. (Stenhouse, 1977, p.4,myitalics)
I am concerned here with how we can improve the professional common sense understanding
of the educator which supports anticipations through diagnostics – in short with the
improvement of judgement. (Stenhouse, 1977, p. 5, my italics)