Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

6 n = 1: The Science and Art of the Single Case in Educational Research 87
can test theory only by taking educational action, that is action which can be justified
in educational rather than experimental terms so that he could conscientiously
take it without experimental intent” (ibid).
Cronbach, similarly, acknowledged the complex particularity of social (including
educational) settings and drew an important conclusion for the direction of social
science research: its primary aim should become “interpretation in context” not
“generalisation” (Cronbach, 1975, p. 123).
St. Clair (2005) has taken the argument a stage further, invoking the notion of
“superunknowns” as an obstacle to any possibility of transferring empirically based
knowledge between educational settings:
In any social situation there are an infinite number of factors that could influence the interaction
between humans (such as weather, language, height, breakfast food, and so on). Any
infinite group of factors, even if there are millions taken into account, leaves an infinite
number unaccounted for – these are the superunnowns....[Further] there is no truly effective
strategy to deal with superunknowns. This is because there are an infinite number of
them, and not only do we not know what they are, we are also unaware exactly how important
they are...[Consequently] If similarity is accepted as the basis for induction, and the
importance of superunknowns is recognised, then the conclusion has to be that the justification
for induction in educational research is weak – there is no systematic, logically coherent
justification for the assumption that what we learn from setting A applies to setting b. (St.
Clair, 2005, p. 446)
The problem about St. Clair’s argument is that it appears to remove the possibility
not only of transferring understanding from one situation to any other but even
of understanding a particular case, since here, too, there will presumably be an infinite
number of unknowns as well as some things which are known. Or, perhaps,
it is simply that one could never understand the particular case fully, which while
not entirely a trivial qualification, would be more than anyone might expect to do
any way.
Nevertheless, St.Clair’s and the other cautions indicated here are ones which I
think need to be taken very seriously, not least because they have important implications
with respect to the level in any educational system at which practical decisions
about teaching need to be taken. They argue that, though the broad values and
principles which a system might be expected to realise might appropriately be determined
through some democratic process at a higher level, decisions about how in
the end to realise these values in practice have to be made on the basis of a detailed
understanding of the particular context in which they are to operate.
This caution has not, however, persuaded all advocates of case study to abandon
the language of “generalisation” even if, as Mejia (2009, p. 2) has pointed out, this
is a very different kind of generalisation from that associated with randomised controlled
trials. “Various authors have rushed to assign it an adjective so that it is made
clear that there is a distinction”: analytic (Yin, 1984), retrospective (Stenhouse,
1980)ornaturalistic (Stake & Trumbull, 1982), among others. “Other authors”, continues
Mejia, “have preferred to drop the term ‘generalisation’ and replace it with
another one: for instance relatability (Bassey, 1981), or transferability (Lincoln &
Guba, 1985)” (Mejia, 2009, p. 2, my italics) – though Bassey did, of course, later
(2001) add fuzzy generalisations to the repertoire.