Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

92 D. Bridges
6.8 Case Study: Science or Art?
This collection of papers comes under the title of The Ethics and Aesthetics of
Statistics. I am not going to say here anything about the ethics of research in which
n = 1, though, of course, such research carries particular responsibilities since, case
study both makes particularly heavy demands on participants (no mere “just 10 min
to complete a questionnaire” here) and because the detailed description which is
typically a feature of a case study makes it difficult to guarantee anonymity, if that
is what is required. But what of the aesthetics of the single case? Is case study more
akin to science or art?
Helen Simons edited a seminal collection of papers, from which I have drawn
extensively, that appeared under the no doubt consciously provocative title Towards
and Science of the Singular (Simons, 1980), and one of its contributors, Stephen
Kemmis was unequivocally committed to “the proposition, so heavily validated
by lay and professional usage that it hardly needs defending, that case study work
is science” (Kemmis, 1980, p. 100 and pages following for his justification). He
argues that
In [three] crucial ways ... case study work is like all forms of science: it is an empirical
process of truth seeking; it is a social, cultural and cognitive process; and it resolves in its
practice the double problem of justifies true belief – the justification of belief and the belief
in justification. (Kemmis, 1980, p. 106)
But even if case study satisfies these three conditions (and I wonder how many
contemporary researchers would concede – even if they should – that they are “truth
seeking”), is this sufficient to demonstrate that case study is a “science”? More
importantly, perhaps, does it matter? Why should one legitimate genre of research
need to conform to the requirements of another – unless one is conceding that
only the scientific, out of all the intellectual resources of the academy, can claim
legitimacy? Kemmis seems to be in danger of falling victim to the very form of
“scientism” that in the same paper he seeks to attack.
It seems to me better to acknowledge that case study has its own strengths rooted
in the arts and humanities rather than in the natural sciences – that this carries with
it requirements for thoroughness, accuracy, attention to detail, but also imagination,
social sensitivity, contextual understanding, and quality requirements in the structure
and writing of the report – in other words its own discipline and rigour which
provide both the warrant for its credibility and the pedagogical or rhetorical power
to affect the reader’s understanding.
To free case study research from the particular requirements of the natural sciences
is not by any means to suggest that anything goes. Simons argues that “The
case study must not only be authentic and detailed ..., it must also be rigorously
accurate and impartial” (Simons, 1971, p. 122). For Stenhouse these principles were
honoured in case study by his requirement that any such study should be linked
to a set of case data, i.e. all the materials assembled by the case worker. These,
he acknowledged would be too bulky for repeated handling and too sensitive for
immediate release, but they were (on an analogy which he drew with historical
research) the primary sources against which, in principle at least the case study