Over-Rapport

Conceptual Overview and Application

Case study research is a methodological model found in a number of academic disciplines, but it may be safe to assert that one of the oldest of those disciplines is sociology. Nearly 50 years ago, Alfred Schutz said that a sociologist is a disinterested scientific onlooker of the social world. At the time, sociologists were engaged in research on drug addicts, sexual deviance, and various assortments of criminals and other segments of society that had a commonsense distinction of being somehow deviant. Nobody would suggest that the researchers themselves were part of the world they investigated, and as a result of this assumed disinterest the results of their research were viewed as objective. This contributed greatly to the believability of their results. In technical terms, believability is embedded somewhat in the term reliability and more so in the term validity.

More than 50 years ago, Seymour Miller wrote a paper warning of the perils of participant observation and over-rapport. In short, it was generally held that for a research result to be taken at face value, the researcher ought not to be invested with the object of the investigation.

However, as one surveys the literature on case study research, in particular in earlier writings based on participant observation, one will see considerable dialogue concerning the need for researchers to really get to know the subjects under investigation, to try and put themselves in the other person's shoes, as John Lofland once wrote. Much of the early literature concerned itself with the difficulties of gaining a relationship with the field under investigation close enough to enable a true understanding of what is going on. Because researchers were working in areas that were outside of their own worlds, the methods for getting close to one's research subjects was an important issue.

Thus, in the early days of case study research believability (reliability and validity) was based largely on scholars who were outside of the worlds they investigated proving that they had gotten inside the community under investigation fully enough to justify a claim of thorough understanding. As time moved on, however, case study methodology became better known and showed promise as a way for scholars in other disciplines to investigate issues more within their own worlds.

One of the first scholars to fully combine his own experience within his investigative arena was Howard Becker, who studied jazz musicians while playing jazz himself in the clubs of Chicago. In his published accounts he wrote that the imaginative [Page 644]use of personal experience will contribute to a researcher's technical skill. The security of believability in research results was crumbling because it was based on the notion that the researcher needed to be a disinterested scientist. However, the challenge for a disinterested scholar to really get to understand his subjects was also a typical challenge to the results of any study. As the case study research models became more prevalent, excellent examples of methodology provided an acceptable route for researchers to show how their results could still be viewed with a great degree of believability. One such way was for researchers to report not only their conclusions and a discussion of these but also to provide slices of the data themselves when building a case for the conclusions proposed. Once armed with an appropriate methodology, scholars from many disciplines began using the case study approach, basing their claims on believability more on the notion that their own personal experience provided a level of expertise that was unavailable to disinterested researchers and that with the inclusion of supporting data the conclusions could be reported with confidence.

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