Fuzzy-Set Social Science. By Charles C. Ragin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 352p. $48.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Extract

The department where I did my graduate training in the early 1970s was bitterly split between advocates of case-study and statistical approaches. At the time, both sides thought the other would fade away—statistical analysis was a fad; case studies, a relic from a prescientific past. But 30 years later, both methods persist, and the debate has recently intensified in response to King, Keohane, and Verba's (1994) assertion in Designing Social Inquiry that the methodology of case studies could be subsumed under that used in statistical research. The polite names for the two positions have changed—“case study” versus “large N” is more common now than the “traditional” versus “scientific” monikers of the 1960s and 1970s; the epithets—“slow journalism” versus “mindless number crunching”—remain much the same.