88 7 Establishing Your Contribution
may be that you spend so much time developing ideas around your case-study area
that you will have little time for the even more important task of seeing how far you
can generalize the results to their broader implications. This doubt, over whether the
results can be generalized, can be resolved only by checking your conclusions on
several other areas, either by doing further work yourself, which you may not have
time to do, or by finding reports of comparable work in the literature. So you need to
keep in mind that most case-study investigations leave many unanswered questions
and pose many hypotheses for further research.
Thus, a case study is, in a sense, a preliminary investigation that seeks to estab-
lish an agenda for further research. Yet in the structure shown the case study is the
main investigation. This is entirely reasonable. Many PhD theses that are taken up
principally by case-study investigations have impressed the examiners. However,
I advise you to express the appropriate reservations about the degree to which the
findings in your case study are generalizable, and to point out the need for further
work to confirm your conclusions.
Method
If you examine a range of theses from the library you will probably see that in many
of them the chapter I am discussing is titled ‘Method’ or ‘Research Method’. You
may also see ‘Methodology’ or ‘Research Methodology’. But this chapter should
include much more than the selection and description of your method. The methods
we select are ways of testing hypotheses or answering questions or evaluating inno-
vations. Therefore, if you call the chapter ‘Research Method’, you are in danger of
forgetting to deal adequately with the identification of hypotheses or questions; and
if your thesis concerns an innovation, you need to describe it somewhere!
In passing, I have just touched on the need to distinguish between method and
methodology. Often researchers use the word ‘methodology’ when they mean
‘method’, perhaps because it sounds more learned. However, methodology is the
branch of knowledge that deals with method and its application in a particular field
of study. For this reason, social scientists use the word to describe the general stance
that the researcher is taking: for example, the researcher as the designer of empirical
experiments, the researcher as objective observer, or the researcher as participant in
the activities under study. You should reserve it for this usage, and should not use it
to describe the design of empirical experiments or objective observations of physi-
cal or biological systems. When scientists are designing work of this kind they take
a highly standardized stance, the researcher as dispassionate outsider, and don’t see
a need to discuss their methodology. However, in many areas of social sciences and
humanities it is important to tell the reader what stance you are taking, and why.
This should be discussed in a separate section on methodology.
In some disciplines, you need to identify your particular stance in regards to the
information, or data, that you are analyzing. Do you see, for example, that your
interpretation of the findings is best viewed through the lens of a neo-Marxist or