Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

88 D. Bridges
How, then are we to respond to the question about how a single case can legitimately
inform educational practice or policy. In the next sections I want to explore
three approaches: (i) the single case as a source of conjecture and refutation; (ii)
relating the particular to the particular; and (iii) the single case as an extension of
experience and as a contribution to practical wisdom.
6.5 The Single Case as a Source of Conjecture and Refutation
In a way this is perhaps the easiest case to advance because it is the most modest in
its claims. Popper (1963) has offered a framing of science as a matter of conjecture
(i.e. theory building or hypothesis formulating) and refutation (the negation of these
through discussion, critique and empirical testing) – and even if this has drawn its
critics it has survived as at least a partial picture of what goes on in scientific enquiry.
I have already discussed the role of the single case in the process of refutation. The
single case (and a fortiori the single case richly described) is enough to make it clear
that what might have been thought to be the case is not necessarily the case, need
not be the case, might not be the case if particular conditions obtained.
It is the refutation side of Popper’s twin concepts that tends to get more attention,
but conjecture is at least as important, and it would be part of my argument that a
well-described or narrated single case, and perhaps even more the sort of accumulation
of cases that Stenhouse favours, provides a fertile source for such conjecture,
moreover one in which the active imagination is “grounded” in a graphic description
of reality or in the multi-perspectival takes on reality that are characteristic of
the modern ethnographic case. In the Cambridge Accountability Project, for example
(Elliott et al., 1981), five researchers spent 18 months studying six secondary
schools and their relations with their parents and communities. Through the process
and on the basis of the evidence generated the researchers kept asking themselves,
“What general principles about school accountability can we offer of these studies?”
(the conjecture) and “Can we find any evidence in the studies to challenge or gainsay
these principles?” (the attempted refutation). In other terms, familiar to anyone
engaged in case research, we were generating grounded theory (see, for example,
Glaser & Strauss, 1967). In such an example, the small scale of the sample is off-set
to some degree by the detailed examination of the cases in question.
In this case the researchers were not technically able to answer the question “How
typical is this experience?” though at no stage in the subsequent conferences and
events for headteachers and local authority officers was this seen as an issue; they
could readily identify with the picture that was provided. In a sense the claim that
I am more interested in making for this sort of research relates to the interest, the
freshness, the fecundity of the insights and ideas that it can generate, and especially
if these insights are sufficiently well grounded and well described that they
command the response “I can see that that is how things were” and perhaps (but
not essential to this part of my argument) “... and I had not thought of it like this
before, but I can see that that is what is also happening in my own school” – which
brings me to my second argument.