Welcome (Back) to the Old World: A Review of Peter Swanborn's Case Study Research: What, Why and How?

Case Study Research (2010), a book by Peter Swanborn, a former chair of methodology at the Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam, joins the collection of scholarly sources (Gerring, 2006; Hancock & Algozzine, 2006; Simmons, 2009; Stake, 1995; Yin, 2008) available to students, researchers and practitioners interested in doing case studies. Although Swanson does not position himself within any particular research epistemology--nor is the issue of researcher's positionality discussed in the book--this text is firmly embedded within an empirical/analytical paradigm. The author situates his book within "a general methodological framework," stressing that the book is not "a handbook on 'qualitative methods,'" but is rather useful for graduate courses with a "strong emphasis on quantitative research" (p. viii). For this reason, the Swanborn text may be of special interest to readers of The Qualitative Report who would like to compare qualitative and quantitative approaches to case study research. Indeed, the quantitative ethos thoroughly permeates each of the seven chapters, which are primarily concerned with the design features (formulating research questions, sampling, data collection and analysis, validity and reliability). For example, data is divided into hard and soft, validity understood in a strictly traditional manner, with a note about alternative criteria as "one of the less fruitful enterprises in the social sciences" (Swanborn, 2010, p. 36), while reliability still depends on the classical principle, the more the better, which in case study research translates as: "a multiple case design is considered to be a series of replications of measurement of the same phenomenon under different, but hopefully irrelevant conditions" (Swanborn, 2010, p. 46). The stage is set up in the first chapter where case studies are seen as a form of an intensive approach to research, focusing on variables and the ways the scores on pairs or sets of variables change over time (versus extensive research, whereupon a researcher collects data on a large number of instances). Swanborn defines a case study as the study of social phenomena that is: * Carried out within the boundaries of a social system (individuals people, organizations, groups, local communities and nation-states); * Conducted in the case's natural setting; * Focused on process; * Guided by an initially broad question, which evolves into the precise one, although a case study can start with a hypothesis to be tested; * Based on several data sources--and Swanborn repeatedly stresses the exact order to be followed--document analysis, interviews, and observations. These features could be played out on multiple levels--micro, meso, and macro--and Swanborn's (2010) focus throughout the book is on the meso level, that is, within organizations, since marketing, human resources management, and management information systems are the most popular branches of case study research. Certainly, sociology, education, psychology, and health sciences students are a suitable audience for this book. However, those who, just like Miles and Huberman (1984, 1994), those cornerstones of many qualitative data analyses sections, call themselves "soft-nosed logical positivists" (Swanborn, 2010, p. 122) will enjoy this book more than interpretivists. The book will hardly speak to post-modernists, let alone poststructuralists. The book is, then, welcoming/beckoning us to the world of an old paradigm, in which qualitative inquiry is still on the fringe. What to Expect from a Case Study and How to Go About it? The goal of case studies is to answer broad questions about social processes, and Swanborn (2010) offers helpful examples of research questions--whats, whys, and hows of the social world--for which this methodology is fitting. However, this open-endedness is closed by a claim that case studies begin with a simple causal model that evolves into the search for "intervening variables in a causal chain" (p. …