Major Forms of Cross-Case Research

Dr. Philip N. Howard

Department of Communication

University of Washington

	Qualitative	Comparative	Quantitative
1. Main Focus	Commonalities	Diversity	Co-variation
2. Error	Little or none	Uniqueness	Explicit vector
3. Theoretical Fit	Nearly perfect	Close	Loose
4. Characteristic Goals	Giving voice or cultural & historical significance	Diversity of types and patterns	Test, predict, generalize
5. Cases/Units	Unknown at first	Historically delimited	Generic
6. Analytic frame	Fluid	Flexible	Fixed
7. Basis	Case	Case and variable	Variable
8. N of “cases”	Small	Moderate	Large
9. Causation	Conjectural	Multiple conjectural	Linear and additive
10. Context	Important	Incorporated	De-emphasized
11. Parsimony	Not important	Some concern	Key concern
12. Technique	Synthetic	Analytic or synthetic	Analytic
13. Generalizing	Very limited	Modest	Broad
14. Attributes	Many	Moderate number	Few

From Ragin, C. (1987). The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press.