Comparative case study as a qualitative method

4.2.2 Comparative case study as a qualitative method

Comparison is a process of studying two or more things to see how they are alike or different – gives attention to certain aspects through the copresence of the other (Epstein, 1983). Comparative education is “a field of study that applies historical, philosophical and social science theories and methods to international problems in education” (Phillips & Schweisfurth, 2006, p. 7). Comparative education focuses on the study of education in terms of cross-cultural and cross-national perspectives (Kubow & Fossum, 2007). Comparative education and international education have been called ‘twin fields’, and the two fields are indeed closely related and highly complementary (Phillips & Schweisfurth, 2006, p. 42). Isaac L. Kandel, “a leading figure in the field of comparative education during the first half of the twentieth

90 century” (Arnove & Torres, 2007, p. 7), believed that “internationalism was one of comparative education’s major contributions” and comparative education could lead to a greater appreciation for and understanding of other countries, as well as one’s own, and lead ultimately to “the development of an internationalism” (1933, p. xxv).

George Bereday (1964) argued that “the aim of comparative education was to search for lessons that can be deduced from the variations in educational practice in different societies” (p. xi). Kubow and Fossum also point out that “comparison challenges students to suspend judgements of those foreign systems that they might derive from their own localized and limited perspectives” (2007, p. 6). In addition to learning about other peoples and cultures, comparative education helps one to know about oneself (Kubow & Fossum, 2007). In general, comparative education examines education in developed and developing countries, for example, the present study conducted in New Zealand and China.

The case study is one of several ways of conducting research in social science. It is increasingly adopted in order to understand complex social phenomena. It is used as a research tool for the researcher to explore “in depth a program, event, activity, process, or one or more individuals” (Creswell, 2009, p. 13) and “to retain the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events” (Yin, 2003, p. 1). Merriam (1988) describes four essential characteristics of qualitative case study research:

particularistic, descriptive, heuristic and inductive:

• Particularistic means that case studies focus on a particular situation, event, program, or phenomenon.

• Descriptive means that the end product of a case study is a rich, “thick”

description of the phenomenon under study.

• Heuristic means that case studies illuminate the reader’s understanding of the phenomenon under study.

• Inductive means that for the most part, case studies rely on inductive reasoning (pp. 12-13).

91 The comparative case study approach as a research design adopted in the present study, as Denscombe (1998, pp. 30-31) points out, has five main characteristics: the concentration on a single instance or a point in time, the in-depth nature of the study, the focus on processes and relationships, the natural setting for the research, and the use of multiple methods and sources. In the present research, the researcher will comparatively examine the process of English language teaching and learning experienced by teachers and students in the two contexts of New Zealand and China.

The present research, taking Denscombe’s five characteristics of case study above into consideration, concentrates on a single instance or a point in time of the English language classroom practice, for example, error correction, classroom tasks and so on in the two contexts. It explores the in-depth natural setting of a real classroom for ESL and EFL, focused not only on processes of the English teaching and learning but also on relationships between teachers and students, and utilizes multiple methods and sources, such as stimulated recall interviews (SRIs), interviews, the Adapted Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) Observation Scheme, and questionnaires (see section 4.5), to illuminate what actually happened in a language classroom in both contexts, China and New Zealand. This comparative case study also encouraged EFL and ESL teachers and their Chinese students to think about which kinds of language teaching approaches or classroom activities are appropriate for what kind of context. As classroom-centred research, this research thus follows a comparative descriptive, qualitative case study approach and provides a holistic account of the phenomena being studied.

4.2.3 Validity

Validity is important in all research methods. An important question with qualitative data or data within an interpretive paradigm is: just how trustworthy are the recorded accounts? In other words, how accurate is the researcher’s observation and interpretations of aspects within language contexts and how might the methodology impact on English language teaching and learning in the two different classrooms?

Stake (1995) notes that case study researchers “have ethical obligations to minimize misrepresentation and misunderstanding as part of their responsibility for a valid case

92 study” (p. 105). Whether research is logical and meaningful mainly depends on the

“nearly complete control” of internal and external validity (Brown, 1999, p. 40).

Internal validity, occurring in the phase of data analysis, does “pattern-matching” and

“explanation-building”, addresses “rival explanations” and uses “logic models”, while external validity, in the phase of research design, uses “theory in single-case studies”

and “replication logic in multiple-case studies” (Yin, 2003, p. 34). Triangulation is “a commonly used technique” which is utilized “to improve the internal validity” of an ethnographic study (Burns, 2000, p. 419). Therefore, triangulation (see section 4.2.4) is utilized in this research as a means of enhancing validity.

4.2.4 Triangulation

It has been suggested that reliance on one method of data collection may bias or distort

the whole picture of the reality that the researcher is probing (Burns, 2000, p.419;

Cohen et al., 2007, p. 141). Triangulation can be defined as a way of using two or more methods of data collection in the study of some phenomena of human behaviour (Burns, 2000, p. 419; Cohen et al., 2007, p. 141). It is widely recognized that triangulation is “a commonly used technique” which is utilized “to improve the internal validity” of an ethnographic study (Burns, 2000, p. 419). According to Cohen et al., there are two advantages of triangulation. As mentioned earlier, firstly, the use of triangular techniques can prevent a single researcher from depending on initial impressions (Burns, 2000, p. 419; Goetz & LeCompte, 1984, p. 11). Secondly, in its use of multiple methods, triangulation can assist in overcoming the problem of

“method-boundedness” (Boring, 1953), defined as method limitations. One other advantage of the use of triangulation, is that it can explore more fully the richness and complexity of human behaviour by means of investigating it from more than one angle, or even in some cases in terms of both qualitative and quantitative methods (Burns, 2000, p.419; Cohen et al., 2007, p. 141). The more the data collection methods differ from each other, the greater confidence the researcher has about the findings (Burns, 2000, p. 419; Cohen et al., 2007, p. 141). Hence, triangulation is adopted in this study to enhance the confidence of the validity and reliability (accuracy) of the information from the data collected in the fieldwork of the present research.

93 There are different types of triangulation. Denzin (cited by Janesick, 2003) specifies four basic types of triangulation: