Generalizations Can Be A Good Thing?

           I think that the word “generalization” caught me off guard in this last chapter. I tend to want to disregard any type of generalizations as weak inferences based on perfunctory stereotypes, and/or limited knowledge or experience. Whenever I encounter a particularly obscure generalization I feel most obligated to expose any ignorance. Of course, not all the time…just usually when I am involved in a discussion about sexism or racism, and someone says something reeeeally stupid. Like when a black guy says that he only dates white/asian women, because of black women’s’ xyz (usually an independent, emasculating attitude), and never admit that his attributing a personally negative experience(s) to all black women is just an excuse to not take any personal responsibility for the failure of his past relationships and the women he chose to be with. I think it bothers me more when someone presents a generalization as an absolute fact, and not a general truth based on limited information (or personal opinion).  

            Anyway, when I really thought about it I realized that generalization isn’t as bad as I thought. I know that I generalize as well, since it is something that all human beings do in order to make sense of the world. Our brains want to place people/things into organized, categorized compartments, so we can associate new information with old information we have already placed in these spaces. That way we can “become more sensible in our actions…[by] modifying, extending, or adding to [our] generalized understandings of how the world works” (Dyson and Genishi 115). This is what is called “naturalistic generalization” in the book (Dyson and Genishi 115).

            The “propositional generalization—assertions about how a studied phenomenon was enacted in a case” was a little more confusing (Dyson and Genishi 114). Unless I read it wrong, I thought that this concept was the whole point of a case study (in general I mean), because you are relating the study of something or someone in particular to something of a broader context. Isn’t that the goal of research anyway? I don’t know, maybe I am overthinking this. I do that, too. I was also confused with the statement about where lines between the case and the phenomenon are blurred: “The detailed work of case study research thus detracts from, rather than contributes to, the analytic, comparative construction of knowledge” (Dyson and Genishi 118). The example of a study leading to the implication that a child should run around unsupervised talking to strangers seemed to be a bit of a stretch. Maybe I missed something…