Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

6 n = 1: The Science and Art of the Single Case in Educational Research 83
... the construction of scenarios and cases is essential in the design of quantitative experiments
and research projects both in the form of discursive assumptions and the actual
case-based pilot studies. But it is no more absent in the policy implementation of the resulting
data. Cases like stories have to be told before a policy based on quantitative “evidence”
can be translated into prescriptive documentation, but they are also essential in the political
justification of policy. (Elliott & Lukes, 2009, pp. 98–99)
In other words, when we are designing a quantitative experiment we have to
construct a story about what might (or might not) happen in a particular situation
given certain limited different conditions; and when we report the research we feel
greater confidence in telling a story about what did happen in those situations given
certain (limited) conditions and what would be likely to happen in other similar
situations (this being the inferential turn). The trouble with such studies is they can
only ever deal with a very limited set of descriptors of the situations abstracted from
what we know to be a very much more complex set of realities – which is precisely
what draws some people towards not just case reasoning but case study.
6.3 Different Forms of the Single Case
On the whole, when we talk of research in education focussed on a single case, we
are not referring to quantitative research. There is, of course, a long tradition of case
study in psychology especially in child psychology. For many teachers from the
1950s and 1960s a “child study” was a key component of their teacher training. The
psycho-analytic tradition was almost entirely constructed around a mixture of theory
and case study (and the cases would not have withstood much scrutiny against
the criterion of their representativeness either). Subsequently in educational circles,
case study became especially associated with ethnographic research in an anthropological
tradition. In the last two decades, encouraged in particular by its espousal by
feminist researchers, case study has often taken the form of biography and autobiography,
narratives of people’s educational lives and experiences presented either as
the outcome of research or as sources to inform the writing of a research account (see
Griffiths & Mcleod, 2009). More widely, “cases” have played a central role in the
development of medical understanding and, whatever might be the general recommendations
for medical practice defined, for example, by the National Institute for
Clinical Excellence, the examination of the individual case and case history remains
central to medical decisions. English common law or, as it is sometimes referred to,
“case” law is indeed constructed around decisions about individual cases that have
been determined in the courts, the historical collection of which constitute the basis
for contemporary legal argument, reference and decision.
In the context of a book which is concerned with historical as well as philosophical
approaches to inquiry, it is relevant to note too Stenhouse’s argument that a great
deal of history is best conceived of as case studies in the sense of studies of particular
defined phenomena bounded by time and place (Stenhouse, 1977). He gave
as examples Girouard’s The Victorian Country House, The working life of women
in the seventeenth century, English wayfaring life in the middle ages and, to focus