Casing the Casey Case

I am really enjoying Dyson and Genishi. Out of the two methods books from this course and the two methods books from Narrative Inquiry, this is by far the best written and the most practical, in my opinion.

These two chapters cover the early steps in Case Studies. Chapter 2, Casing the Joint is about all the legwork you should do before actually engaging the case, whereas Chapter 3 is about your methods as you begin the case study. The first thing I realized is that my previous conceptions of what a case study was were completely wrong. From undergraduate school I had the idea that case studies were a primarily forensic activity, going through documents and interviewing people surrounding a person or an event in the past-tense. If you had described any of the examples given in this book to me without using the words case study I would not have labeled them such, instead I would have just called them in-depth observations or something similar.

In Casing the Joint, the authors mention how everything can have significance to your study, and they bring up the physical location of classrooms and bathrooms in the building. This is funny, because one of my current primary focuses is gifted education, and when I was in a pull-out program for GT class in elementary school our classroom was a trailer behind the school, beside another trailer used for special education classes.

That chapter goes on to specify four common categories of cases to study – Maps, Schedules, People, and Languages/sociolinguistics.

Both of these chapters brought up several important considerations I will try to keep in mind in my research. The first, and one I wouldn't have thought about: the problem with recurring observation times. Another was to consider even small details about how you present yourself as researcher. Big picture stuff I would have considered, like the role in the classroom they dissected pretty well, but things like dress and language you use and where you sit I might not have given much consideration beyond what was convenient and obvious. In fact, the whole section on being conscious of the researcher/”I” was very useful and more extensively laid out than some of our other texts. A final consideration is casing the joint in order to choose people to focus on in the study. I think I would have made assumptions on who I would observe before really entrenching myself in an environment, probably based primarily on trying to get a representation of the general population, but it makes sense that you want to carefully select people in order to address what you're researching. The book uses the example of choosing students who interact a lot with other students but also change their behavior between different groups.

Lastly, a few small sections I wanted to highlight.

On page 52, the researcher mentions the hosting teacher showing them around the neighborhood. I found this amusing because I could not picture this happening at all in the mid-size town I grew up in.

On page 27, the book uses the quote “a classroom may be thought of as a series of social events” which ties to the idea of “cultural events from the first chapter, an idea and thought pattern I really like, since it reminds us as researchers that we are looking at environments as an idea, as a process, not as a static place.

On page 56 they use the phrase “like curly hair on a damp day” to discuss factors that can't be easily controlled. I couldn't decide if this made me like the authors less or more, but it's part of a pattern of most of the material we've been reading in all of my classes make a demonstrative effort, to be more informal. Sometimes it's hilarious and awkward and doesn't really seem to fit. This is one of those times.