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Copyright

Stuart N. Lane;

Published On

2025-02-25

Page Range

pp. 447–454

Language

  • English

Print Length

8 pages

24. Case studies

Chapter of: The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research(pp. 447–454)
Case-study research commonly engages intensively with particular places to reveal what is producing, how they work, rather than how frequent they are. As they focus on the “local” they pose the challenge of separating out the detail from more general findings. However, the criticism of their detailed nature overlooks the fact that a case-study is just one means of reducing the scope of a question to a manageable format. Known as closure, other researchers (e.g. in the laboratory) do this in different ways. Case-studies are commonly a geographical form of closure. We note that case-studies are particularly important because they can yield explanation, and so avoid the problems of more extensive research (e.g. statistical research) where the number of times something happens does not necessarily tell you why something happens.

Contributors

Stuart Lane

(author)
Professor of Geomorphology at University of Lausanne
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6077-6076

Stuart N. Lane is Professor of Geomorphology at the University of Lausanne. He is a geographer and civil engineer by training who has held posts at the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Durham in the U.K. and Lausanne in Switzerland. His work has sought to bring a geographical perspective to contemporary environmental concerns such as flooding and pollution. The primary focus of his current work is the environments created by disappearing glaciers in terms of ice, water, sediment and ecosystems and the consequences of these changes for environmental management. An important thread through his most recent research criticizes the current alignment of geography as a discipline with the ever more neo-liberal academy; and then argues for the rediscovery of a more scientific geographical science better able to cope with the crises the world is experiencing today.