Yin - Case study research : design and methods

Case Study

Research This book is dedicated to Hans-Lukas Teuber, who made research a lifelong goal for all who studied with him.

Case Study

Research

Design and Methods

Robert K. Yin COSMOS Corporation

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Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Yin, Robert K.
Case study research : design and methods / Robert K. Yin. Fifth edition.

pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4522-4256-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4833-0200-3 (web pdf) 1. Case method.
2. Social sciencesResearch--Methodology. I. Title.

H62.Y56 2014
300.722dc23	2013008876

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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B RIEF C ONTENTS

D ETAILED C ONTENTS

Donald T. Campbell

A BOUT THE A UTHOR

Robert K. Yin is President of COSMOS Corporation, an applied research and social science firm. Over the years, COSMOS has successfully completed hundreds of projects for federal agencies, state and local agencies, and private foundations, and most of this books applications come from these projects.

Outside of COSMOS, Dr. Yin has assisted numerous other research groups, helping to train their field teams or to design research studies. Recent engagements have been with evaluation teams at The World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme. Another assignment has been to provide guidance to assist doctoral students at the University of Copenhagen. Currently, Dr. Yin holds the position of distinguished scholar-in-residence at American Universitys School of International Service (Washington, D.C.). Earlier, he served as Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Government Accountability Offices research methodology division.

Dr. Yin has authored over 100 journal articles, reports, and books. His first book on the case study method, Case Study Research: Design and Methods (2014), is in its fifth edition. A companion book, Applications of Case Study Research (2012), is in its third edition. He has edited two case study anthologies (Yin, 2004, 2005) and has most recently authored a new text on qualitative research methods (Yin, 2011). Dr. Yin received his B.A. in history from Harvard College (magna cum laude) and his Ph.D. in brain and cognitive sciences from MIT.

F OREWORD

I t is a privilege to provide the foreword for this fine book. It epitomizes a research method for attempting valid inferences from events outside the laboratory while at the same time retaining the goals of knowledge shared with laboratory science.

More and more I have come to the conclusion that the core of the scientific method is not experimentation per se but rather the strategy connoted by the phrase plausible rival hypotheses. This strategy may start its puzzle solving with evidence, or it may start with hypothesis. Rather than presenting this hypothesis or evidence in the context-independent manner of positivistic confirmation (or even of postpositivistic corroboration), it is presented instead in extended networks of implications that (although never complete) are nonetheless crucial to its scientific evaluation.

This strategy includes making explicit other implications of the hypotheses for other available data and reporting how these fit. It also includes seeking out rival explanations of the focal evidence and examining their plausibility. The plausibility of these rivals is usually reduced by ramification extinction, that is, by looking at their other implications on other data sets and seeing how well these fit. How far these two potentially endless tasks are carried depends on the scientific community of the time and what implications and plausible rival hypotheses have been made explicit. It is on such bases that successful scientific communities achieve effective consensus and cumulative achievements, without ever reaching foundational proof. Yet, these characteristics of the successful sciences were grossly neglected by the logical positivists and are underpracticed by the social sciences, quantitative or qualitative.

Such checking by other implications and the ramification-extinction of rival hypotheses also characterizes validity-seeking research in the humanities, including the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Hirst, Habermas, and current scholarship on the interpretation of ancient texts. Similarly, the strategy is as available for a historians conjectures about a specific event as for a scientists assertion of a causal law. It is tragic that major movements in the social sciences are using the term hermeneutics to connote giving up on the goal of validity and abandoning disputation as to who has got it right. Thus, in addition to the quantitative and quasi-experimental case study approach that Yin teaches, our social science methodological armamentarium also needs a humanistic validity-seeking case study methodology that, although making no use of quantification or tests of significance, would still work on the same questions and share the same goals of knowledge.

As versions of this plausible rival hypotheses strategy, there are two paradigms of the experimental method that social scientists may emulate. By training, we are apt to think first of the randomized-assignment-to-treatments model coming to us from agricultural experimentation stations, psychological laboratories, randomized trials of medical and pharmaceutical research, and the statisticians mathematical models. Randomization purports to control an infinite number of rival hypotheses without specifying what any of them are. Randomized assignment never completely controls these rivals but renders them implausible to a degree estimated by the statistical model.

The other and older paradigm comes from physical science laboratories and is epitomized by experimental isolation and laboratory control. Here are the insulated and lead-shielded walls; the controls for pressure, temperature, and moisture; the achievement of vacuums; and so on. This older tradition controls for a relatively few but explicitly specified rival hypotheses. These are never controlled perfectly, but well enough to render them implausible. Which rival hypotheses are controlled for is a function of the disputations current in the scientific community at the time. Later, in retrospect, it may be seen that other controls were needed.

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