Abstract

STILES, William B.. When is a case study scientific research?. Subj. procesos cogn. [online]. 2009, vol.13, n.2, pp.215-223. ISSN 1852-7310.

I propose this answer to the title question: When observations of the case are explicitly brought to bear on a theory. I will first try to describe briefly what I mean by scientific research and how case studies can fit the description. Then, as an illustration, I will describe the assimilation model, a theory about how people change in therapy (Stiles, 2001, 2002; Stiles et al., 1990), and give some examples of how case studies have been brought to bear on it. In this article, I focus on the scientific purposes of case studies. I acknowledge, however, that case studies may be interesting or enriching independently of their contribution to scientific theory (Stiles, 2003).

Keywords : Psychotherapy research; Case studies; Methodology; Conceptual validity.

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