Case Studies: One Observation or Many? Justification or Discovery?

Abstract

Critiques of case studies as an epistemic genre usually focus on the domain of justification and hinge on comparisons with statistics and laboratory experiments. In this domain, case studies can be defended by the notion of “infirming”: they use many different bits of evidence, each of which may independently “infirm” the account. Yet their efficacy may be more powerful in the domain of discovery, in which these same different bits of evidence must be fully integrated to create an explanatory account with internal validity.