Telling Convincing Stories: A Plea for Cautious Positivism in Case-Studies

One way of describing the qualitative-quantitative distinction in the social sciences is by a fairly conventional sociology of knowledge. Viewed from the eastern edge of the Atlantic Ocean, one may detect two very different fashions in social research. Viewed by the contents of its learned journals, North America looks like the home of quantitative research. Survey research and, to a lesser extent, official statistics comprise the staple diet of published papers. The occasional case-study does appear but it seems to be self-conscious in such company and will often make every effort to dress itself up in the anonymous style of the scientific paper in order to make itself look less out of place.