Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

6 n = 1: The Science and Art of the Single Case in Educational Research 89
6.6 Relating the Particular to the Particular
In its most significant form, generalisation about the case promotes generalisation from case
to case...as in art, which teaches by example rather than precept...(Adelman Kemmis, &
Jenkins, 1980, p. 142)
When Kennedy asked teachers what persuaded them about the utility of a particular
piece of research, she began to build up a picture that applied, in fact,
independently of the genre of research which they encountered: “teachers forged
analogies between the studies they read and their own situations or practices”
(Kennedy, 1999, p. 537, my italics). “Forging analogies” is one way of expressing
the processes which are involved in coming to understand one situation through
an understanding of another. It is this process that Stake refers to a “naturalistic
generalisation”:
Often the situation ... is one in which there is need for generalisation to a similar case
rather than generalisation to a population of cases. Then the demands for typicality and
representativeness yield to need for assurance that the target case is properly described. As
readers recognise essential similarities to cases of interest to them, they establish the basis
for naturalistic generalisation. (Stake, 1980, p. 71)
However, I think it is misleading to call this process “generalisation”, because
there is no generalisation and none is required. It is not a matter of a logical sequence
which starts with a particular instance, moves inductively to a general theory about
the class to which the instance belongs and then deduces from the general theory
what might be the case in another particular instance that fall within the class.
It makes no general claims. It simply affirms that this single instance A is sufficiently
like another instance B that I can gain some understanding of B through my
understanding of A. “The general idea is that rich description of a single case or
of a reduced number of cases, if of good quality, will help other practitioners see
their own cases reflected and judge for themselves what is applicable in their own
practice” (Mejia, 2009, pp. 2–3).
Such – let us call it – “application” of the single case is especially significant in
the context of the relationship between research and practitioners, who are on the
whole not too bothered about whole populations or systems of children, classrooms
or schools (and will probably regard their own situation as unique any way) but only
in their own situation. They are not so interested in general theory but in principles
and practices which they can identify with and which “fit” with their experience in
their own classroom.
I strongly suspect that, notwithstanding their public subscription to the cult of
large numbers, policy-makers do not respond very differently to practitioners in this
respect, though it would need a different kind of study to establish this. Elliott and
Lukes’ account of “case reasoning” fits with a model in which, even faced with, for
example, the quantified results from a randomised controlled experiment, a policymaker
still needs to envisage the forces at work in terms of a picture of what might
be happening in a situation with which he or she is familiar or, perhaps, one which
they have experienced vicariously or one they can construct in their imagination.