What Can You Do With a Single Case? How to Think About Ethnographic Case Selection Like a Historical Sociologist

Most social scientists agree that case studies are useful for “theory building,” but ethnographic methods papers often look to survey research for case selection strategies. This is due to a common but untenable distinction between theoretical and empirical generalization, which obscures how theoret...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSociological methods & research Vol. 51; no. 3; pp. 931 - 962
Main Author Pacewicz, Josh
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.08.2022
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Case Studies
Classification
Comparative Analysis
Conventions
Ethnographers
Ethnography
Generalization
Guidelines
Historical sociology
History
Polls & surveys
Social Sciences
Sociology
Validity
comparative-historical sociology
case selection
philosophy of explanation
ethnography
theory
external validity
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Summary:Most social scientists agree that case studies are useful for “theory building,” but ethnographic methods papers often look to survey research for case selection strategies. This is due to a common but untenable distinction between theoretical and empirical generalization, which obscures how theoretically inclined ethnographers make implicit external validity claims. I analyze several exemplary ethnographies to show that (a) the distinction between theoretically and empirically oriented ethnography revolves around competing conventions for making claims that others accept as provisionally externally valid, (b) comparative-historical sociology provides a framework for evaluating how theoretically oriented ethnographies make such claims, and (c) each approach to making validity claims is optimized by different kinds of cases. Empirically oriented ethnographies make inductive claims via “pointy” cases wherein a phenomenon is pronounced or bifurcated. Theoretically oriented ethnographers are like post–Millian historical sociologist who triangulate past studies with resolutive or negative cases to make constitutive arguments.
ISSN:0049-1241
1552-8294
DOI:10.1177/0049124119901213