The distinctiveness of case-oriented research.

Abstract

It is common in discussions of methodology to focus on techniques of data collection and to group techniques into two main families, qualitative and quantitative.Techniques in the qualitative group conventionally include ob- servation, in-depth interviewing, focus groups, and so on; techniques in the quantitative group include surveys, analysis ofrecords and other archival data, census data, and so on (see, e.g., Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias 1992, who discuss qualitative research in the section on data collection).In general, this distinction is useful because the most basic prerequisite for the use of sophisticated quantitative techniques of data analysis is a large number of cases.Thus, data collection techniques that generate large numbers of observations are usually grouped together as quantitative methods.Further, most quantitative analyses are centrally concerned with the problem of making inferences from a sample to a population, and it is generally agreed that the relatively small, unrepresentative "samples" generated by qualitative methods offer a weak basis for making such inferences (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994).While useful, the identity of qualitative and quantitative methods with specific techniques of data collection is unfortunate, for it obscures more basic differences in research goals and strategies.More fundamental than the distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection is the distinction between case-oriented and variable-oriented research strategies (Ragin 1987(Ragin , 1994).The case-oriented strategy is centrally concerned with

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