Research Student Seminar by Professor Rob Walker - 'Case record and case study'

Rob Walker presented this week's seminar (7/2/08) on 'Case record and case
study'. His central issue was around how to separate out the reporting on a
case from the interpretation of the case by the researcher. When
constructing a case study, the researcher needs to make decisions about what
is important to include in their account and the reader inevitably only
hears part of the story. Rob explained that this seminar would be looking at
how the researcher can give their audience more insight into the
relationship between the material they have collected and the case study
presented.

Rob began by giving us an historical account of how the term 'case record'
had originated. Laurence Stenhouse, the founder of CARE, had begun to
reflect on ways of validating a case study in the 1970s when he first
encountered PhD theses that were case based (e.g. Robert Burgess' case study
of a Catholic boys' secondary school). Before this time, educational theses
were based on statistical data and followed a predictable form with chapters
on methodology, research hypotheses, literature review, findings and
appendices that would contain all the statistical data needed for the
reader/examiner to test the claims of the writer. When students began to
write case studies for their theses, Stenhouse became concerned about the
interpretation of the researcher and wrote a series of papers about the idea
of a 'case record'. His argument was that if a researcher was going to
present a case study, they would need a documentary record behind it,
equivalent to the set of tables in an appendix, so that the reader could
gain an insight into the researcher's interpretation of the empirical
evidence collected. Having been trained as a historian, Stenhouse drew on
his understanding of historical methods (such as working from documents in
an archive to write a history) as a model for thinking about case study.

Since Stenhouse's time, thinking about the relationship between the
researcher and the researched and between 'facts' and 'interpretations' has
become more complicated. As an illustration, Rob pointed out how
ethnographers and feminist researchers have raised questions about the
'deeply inscribed values' in research texts which were assumed to report
'facts'. The notion of ethnography as writing has led researchers to rethink
whether the reporting of findings can ever be separated from the
researcher's interpretation (as implied by the notion of 'case record').

Rob drew attention to another idea that Stenhouse had come up with in the
1970s which is only now gaining popularity. Stenhouse was concerned that
much qualitative research seemed to consist only of 'one-off' studies and
was struck by the contrast with scientific research where researchers shared
databases and fed their findings into a database for others to build on.
Social science (apart perhaps from anthropology where researchers have
worked more closely together to link, for instance, studies on kinship
structures) tended to be more individualistic. Stenhouse wanted to find ways
of sharing databases and to get a sense of a common educational research
enterprise. He thought that if individual researchers could produce case
records and put these in an archive to build up a collection of case
records, they could start to conduct research that crossed the archive and
was a collaborative effort. As a starting point, he wrote a research
proposal with five researchers who all had different individual questions
(e.g. one around classroom issues, another looking at the notion of
headship), yet they would share and contribute to a common set of case
records. Unfortunately this research project never got funded!


Last year, Rob decided to take the case record idea and see what it would
look like in the context of multimedia (since Stenhouse was working at that
time with handwritten fieldnotes, documents etc). Kathleen Lane and Rob
produced two case studies and case records that might be useful for teacher
educators. Kathleen constructed a case record about using handheld computers
in an art gallery and Rob decided to look at how the design of school
building can help children learn. Rob then took us through the multimedia
case record that he had constructed, based on a primary school in Australia:
'The real world of technology: Wooranna Park Primary School'. The title is
taken from a book by Ursula Franklin which had influenced Rob's thinking
about technology and learning. Franklin argues that technology should not be
regarded as an addition to the way we live but is a deep part of our culture
- the buildings we live in and the clothes we wear.


The case record of this primary school contains many different materials -
brochures from the school, photos, census data about the area, maps and
video clips of interviews and observation in the school. Rob chose to study
this school because they had worked intensively with an architect over seven
years to develop an environment which would facilitate different approaches
to learning. The designer had worked with groups of children, sending them
to see different places (such as a museum, a design studio, radio station
and furniture factory) so that they could talk about what they had seen in
terms of the relationship between the place and the work that took place
there. The children then began to discuss with the architect and the
teachers about the kind of places they would like in their part of the
school - for instance, they were interested in the design of the studio they
had visited as a 'democratic work space'. We watched a 'video walk-through'
of different areas in the school (conferencing area, educational games space
etc) with Rob interviewing a teacher about the relationship between the way
teaching was organised and the curriculum. The case record also contains
interviews with the designer and stories of project work (see
<http://www.camot.es/> www.camot.es - then go to 'Educational Platform', and
'cases').


Rob concluded by reflecting on some of the issues that had arisen during the
process of constructing both the case record and the case study. Like other
case study researchers, he felt that there were gaps which he would have
liked to fill - one being teachers' histories and their careers. However, as
Barry MacDonald had commented (echoing Auden!): 'a case study is never
complete, just left'. There had also been problems due to relying heavily on
video - that people would say some things face-to-face but not on camera. As
a result, we 'don't see the dark side' and the case record presents a very
optimistic picture of the school. However Rob's aim of helping people to
'get inside' the case study and experience the complexity of schools was
achieved through the case record. Rob wanted the case record 'to be
confusing', in order to challenge the common practice in educational
research of having a brief 'case study' which tries to simplify rather than
to present the complexity of a case.


In discussion, other points were raised about the relationship between the
case study and the case record and the difficulties of presenting
complexity:


- What about the ethical constraints if you want to show
'everything' (the complexity)? Rob suggested that we tend to think about
research in terms of an 'intervention' (how does research affect people's
lives?) and this influences how we approach ethics. He emphasised the
importance of trust in this process. For instance, using a video camera was
an imposition both on the participants and himself as researcher and it was
important that he had a relationship based on trust with the camera man and
the sound recordist.


- We have seen the case record, but where is the case study? Rob
explained that there are other sections of the website where he has
interpreted the case record in relation to Ursula Franklin's ideas about
technology. He was also interested to see how other people could use and
interpret the case record in different ways. For instance, one researcher
might construct a case study about school organisation, another about
English teaching and he thought that he could plot their routes through the
case record. However, he found that the information that different people
wanted for their specific purposes was often missing so it was difficult to
do this in the end. Whereas Stenhouse had envisaged that the case record
would be condensed down to a case study, Rob sees the multi-media version as
much more interactive and not a linear relationship between case study and
case record.


- Is case study still popular in UK educational research? Rob
suggested that policy makers want to develop educational ideas, they look
for example case studies - for instance, a case study of how literacy hour
works in practice. There were still however questions about what case study
had come to mean in a policy context (such as being reduced to examples of
good practice) and whether this was accepted as rigorous research by the
research community.


Many thanks to Rob for taking us through this unusual case record and case
study which brought up questions not just about the relation between the
material you collect and its presentation as case study, but also about the
use of video and other technologies in field research. One of the group
described how she had recently used Skype to interview a bangle seller in
Pakistan about his numeracy practices. We will continuing our discussion of
the issues introduced by Rob around the writing of research texts in our
next seminar on ethnography and participant observation. This seminar will
be held on February 14th. 10 - 1230 in EDU Room 01.18. If you are attending
the seminar, it would be helpful to read some of the articles on the
attached list (you can borrow hard copies to photocopy from Dawn Corby). I
am also attaching a revised seminar schedule - please note that the seminar
on March 6th will be on 'Exploring case study' and there will not be a
seminar on March 13th.