The Autopsy Approach to Social Research : The Logic of Explaining Single Outcomes

The status of case study research has generated a vigorous debate among social scientists. This has been a fruitful debate inasmuch as it has encouraged us to think more carefully about our causal inferences, but those who have engaged in this debate have unnecessarily assumed theory building and theory testing are the only legitimate goals of social research. In this paper, I argue that relaxing this assumption puts us in a better position to appreciate the fact that explaining specific historical outcomes, while conforming to a different logic than statistical methods, is still scientific in its ambitions and methods. Toward this end, I suggest that we think of case study research, conceptualized as the study of single outcomes, as analogous to autopsies. The goal of the medical examiner, for example, is not to test a general theory of death, but to use general knowledge about the causes of death to explain a single outcome. I argue that what this approach requires is the derivation of multiple hypotheses from different causal theories in order to assess the relative explanatory power of alternate explanations for a single outcome