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The Limitations of Case Studies: When More Than a Few Good Anecdotes are Needed to Land that Contract

Birkhoff, Juliana. SPIDR News, Jan. 1, 2000

This article warns that reliance on one or two cases studies is not sufficient to prove the success of a dispute resolution program. "One, or even several case studies, can demonstrate how a dispute resolution process works and whether it is successful. But it will not be convincing to conclude from case studies that a stream of cases, a program, will have the same effects. A case study or a study that investigates a series of cases is useful because it includes the context in the research. But the same richness that you get from a case study also allows 'bean counters' opportunities to pick apart the study. So your critic could look at the dispute resolution case study research and say that the researchers did not systematically compare the successful cases with the similar unsuccessful cases to see if there was something unique about those cases that led to success."

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