Case studies

I'm not terribly familiar with case studies as a research strategy, so it was a bit of a struggle for me to wrap my head around what is being said in this week's readings (although, this has been a phenomenon that I've encountered many, many times in the last year here). I liked Beaulieu et. al's "middle range" reflection on it, where, if I'm understanding it, it "generalizes" in the way that it can provide a rich set of empirical data that can be used to either affirm or show gaps in an existing theory/conceptual framework. To me, at least viscerally, this seems reasonable: you aren't really going to get a "grand theory" out of it, but it can illustrate how something plays out in practice.

Nevertheless, the readings bring up a number of problems and I'm not sure I buy how they are addressed. Yin describes how researchers can easily become bogged down with too much data, and suggests narrowing one's focus to "meaningful" events. In a way, this seems slippery to me in that if you are too determined to look for what you are looking for, you risk finding it. I also find Yin's response to the problem of participant objection to the final report kind of fishy. I mean, if you were to show them aggregated data, it seems obvious that they would have a harder time disagreeing with it because they know it's not *just* their data. I'm not quite sure that justifies ignoring the problem.