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SUMMARY:Learning from case studies - Petri Ylikoski (University of Helsink
 i)
DTSTART:20201104T130000Z
DTEND:20201104T143000Z
UID:TALK153691@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Matt Farr
DESCRIPTION:The case study is one of the most important research designs i
 n many social scientific fields\, but no shared understanding exists of th
 e epistemic import of case studies. One of the perennial challenges of cas
 e study research has been the problem of generalization. Social scientists
  expect to learn something more general from case studies\, but articulati
 ng how this 'generalization' works has proved to be difficult. From early 
 on\, there has been an agreement that case studies cannot produce statisti
 cal generalizations and that statistical measures of representativeness ar
 e not adequate for the purposes of case study research. However\, a genera
 lly acceptable alternative view has failed to emerge. Sociologist Howard S
 . Becker argues in his _What About Mozart? What About Murder? Reasoning fr
 om Cases_ (2014) that case study research is about learning about social m
 echanisms. Rather than being about timeless generalizations about relation
 s between variables\, case studies help us to learn about social mechanism
 s\, or logics of situation\, that produce great variety of social experien
 ces depending on contextual details. My aim is to provide a philosophical 
 reconstruction of this idea. For Becker\, the notion of a mechanism is bas
 ically a useful metaphor that captures salient dynamical features of some 
 recurring social situations. I suggest that a more systematic idea about m
 echanism-based theorizing developed within so-called analytical sociology 
 could be employed to make sense of case studies.
LOCATION:Zoom
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