Stories and Experiments in Social Inquiry

The dualism between idiographic case study and nomothetic comparative research methods often pointed to is seen to be reconcilable through paying attention to the processes by which social inquiry attempts to achieve intersubjectivity within an experience collective. This collective consists of a three-way relationship between the inquirer who pursues a research question, actors who form the subject of the inquiry, and the audience(s) who are users of the outcomes of an inquiry. Conventionally, case studies are associated with an ethnographic tradition in which the inquirer acts more as a participant observer and narrator of a story, while com parative studies are seen to be associated with a natural science stance in which the inquirer is treated as a remote observer, interaction with the actors is seen as leading to bias and where the scientific experiment offers an ideal model. The paper discusses four generic types of inquiry — the exploratory case, the crucial experiment, the extensive experiment and the illustrative case — in terms of the degree of codification of method, the degree of criticality in relation to an exist ing theoretical paradigm, and a number of processes covering such matters as sam pling, analysis and presentation of results. It is suggested that these processes provide a means of generating intersubjectivity within an 'experience collective' in social inquiry, that can best proceed through an interplay between all four types of inquiry.