CASE STUDIESorientations to the persons described, readers,
and authorship. Other analyses focus on the vari-
ous rhetorical devices used by ethnographers to
write their case studies (Bruyn 1966). Such rhetori-
cal devices include metaphor, irony, paradox, syn-
ecdoche, and metonymy, which ethnographers
use both to describe others and to cast their de-
scriptions as objective and authoritative.
Qualitative sociologists’ interest in writing case
studies may be part of a larger interdisciplinary
movement involving social scientists and human-
ists. The movement is concerned with analyzing
the rhetorics of social scientific inquiry (Nelson et
al. 1987) as well as how to write better narratives.
The latter issue is basic to efforts by British sociolo-
gists to develop new forms of writing that better
reflect the ways in which their case studies are
socially constructed (Woolgar 1988) and other
sociologists’ interest in developing alternatives to
the logico-scientific writing style that better ex-
press their theoretical perspectives, political phi-
losophies, and experiences (DeVault 1990; Rich-
ardson 1990). A related change in this area is some
sociologists’ interest in using performance art to
represent their research data. For example, Caro-
lyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner (1992) have written a
play about the experiences and dilemmas faced by
women and their male partners in deciding wheth-
er to abort the woman’s pregnancy. Ellis and
Bochner state that this presentational form allows
for a wider range of communication devices than
does the usual textual approach to reporting case-
study findings.
In sum, the case-study method is a dynamic
approach to studying social life, which sociologists
modify and use to achieve diverse political and
theoretical goals. While the popularity of the case-
study method waxes and wanes over time, it is
likely to always be a major research strategy of
humanistically oriented sociologists.
(SEE ALSO: Ethnomethodology; Field Research Methods; Life
Histories; Qualitative Methods)
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