Case Study Research: Principles and Practices

Case Study Research: Principles and Practices. John Gerring. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 265 pp.

Case Study Research is a book with a mission. What John Gerring aims for, and contributes with great success, is a conceptual manifesto and foundational guidelines that demarcate the case study approach as a research methodology. Gerring's starting point is what cheekily could be called the case study method's public relations problem. According to Gerring, case studies are the basis for many highly influential works in the social sciences, but, frustratingly, the case study approach is disrespected because its methodological underpinnings are poorly understood and considered suspect. Gerring's tonic to change this paradoxical status is to address how broad concerns of research designs, issues such as discerning causality and generalizing from findings, apply directly to the case study method. With an impressive combination of rigor and comprehensiveness, Gerring covers how the case study approach, in principle and practice, connects to those issues.

The book decisively addresses, but also transcends, two traditional end points in the case study research literature: the definitional quagmire of identifying what...