Title:	Case Studies and Causal Inference
Authors:	Ingo Rohlfing
Keywords:	An Integrative Framework
Issue Date:	2012
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	‘Do not select cases that do not vary on the outcome; you cannot learn anything from them.’ This is one of the main messages that I took from my research design course a decade ago, a course that heavily built on what is arguably the most influential book on social science methods, King, Keohane, and Verba’s (1994) Designing Social Inquiry. At that point in time, as I had completed some statistics education, this advice struck me as quite reasonable. How would I do a correlational analysis if the cases do not vary on the dependent variable in the first place? In retrospect, I recognize that I was fully subscribing to a ‘statistical worldview’ (McKeown 1999) on the social and political sphere and on social science methods. However, as is the case with many, I was not aware that I had made this subscription, as we did not discuss any of the numerous possible responses and replies to Designing Social Inquiry in the research design course. It was only at the beginning of my PhD studies that a methods workshop exposed me to the methods debate that had evolved following the publication of Designing Social Inquiry. In retrospect, these workshops also constituted the beginning of my own work on various aspects of social science methods and methodology. Appearing after a considerable delay, the present book is one major outcome of my engagement with the methods literature and will, I hope, also make some contribution to it. (For those who might be thinking, ‘Please, not another book doing some infighting with Designing Social Inquiry’, I can assure the reader that this is not the style of my book. Although I periodically draw on Designing Social Inquiry, this book represents a single, though certainly valuable, contribution to the development of the social science methods to which I refer in my book.)
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/50990
ISBN:	978-1-137-27132-7
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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