Why the case study methodology was selected

An important factor in choosing the case study method is that, as a teacher in the Inner London School, easy access to African-Caribbean boys, teachers and the headteacher can be obtained, to collect primary data. Also working in the school as a teacher enables me to see the boys and teachers in their natural settings and to observe the way they interact. As a result, further inside knowledge of the institution, the boys and their teachers can be gained. It is recognised that there are disadvantages too. For example an outsider might be more convoluted and may not see any hidden agendas whereas, an insider may see or know things and read more into it than the outsider would. In other words, someone from inside the organisation may not be able to separate their role as a researcher to that of a teacher and ‗stand back‘ enough to remain totally objective. Stake (1995) takes the view that a case study is expected to catch the complexity of a single case and most studies stem from the interest in education and social research about people and programs. It is its uniqueness and commonality that we seek to understand. This is pertinent in trying to get to grips with how African-Caribbean boys interact in school both in a social and educational context and in examining how their teachers perceive them.

A further reason for selecting the case study method is that it facilitates the study of the students in their school settings in order to find out about their opinions, beliefs and attitudes. A case study is an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident. The case study method is appropriate, because these contextual conditions are appropriate to the study of African-Caribbean boys. It is important and necessary to hear the voices of these boys within the institutional context because it allows me to find out about their attitude to

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learning, school, teachers‘ and to look at the subcultures they develop within the educational settings in which they learn, play and develop social roles (Yin, 2003).

Case studies have a further strength, because the results are more easily understood by a wide audience as they are frequently written in every day informal language and therefore immediately intelligible and speak for themselves. This methodology captures unique features that might otherwise be lost in larger scale data which may hold the key to understanding the situation. Case studies are also strong on reality and provide insights into other similar situations and cases, thereby assisting interpretation of other similar cases and can be undertaken by a single researcher without needing a full research team. The case study can also embrace and build in anticipated events and uncontrolled variables (Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2003).

According to Cohen et al (2003) however, the weaknesses of case studies are that the results may not be generalisable, except where other readers/researchers see their application. Also case studies, compared with larger more quantifiable studies, are not easily open to cross-checking, therefore they may be seen to be selective, biased, personal and subjective and prone to problems of researcher bias, despite attempts made to address reflexivity. Researchers who use case studies invariably accept that there are methodological issues associated with them. This does not however, prevent them from being thorough and reliable.

This study will continue to emphasise the need to examine how the participants in this study see their world, how they perceive their experiences, and how they feel about teachers, learning, qualifications, school and subcultures. The view held by Gomm, Hammersley and Foster (2000) is that what becomes useful understanding is a full and thorough knowledge of the particular, which is not scientific induction but naturalistic generalization. This they argue develops as a product of experience allowing the researcher to derive knowledge of how things are, why they are, how people feel about them and how these things are likely to be later or in other places with which this person is familiar.

As a result of time constraints and funding, the single case study method has been chosen as it is the most cost effective and appropriate methodology. Working in the

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school in which this study is based, participants would be more accessible without causing them too much disruption in their natural school world. According to Gomm

et al. (2000) a case is often thought of as a constituent member of a target population

and since single members generally do not reflect whole populations, one case study is seen to be a poor basis for generalization. The case needs to be a person or an enterprise or whatever bounded system is of interest, an institution, a programme, a responsibility. It is distinctive in the first place because it gives great prominence to what is and what is not ‗the case‘ – the boundaries are kept in focus and what is happening is seen as important within those boundaries and is considered vital, determining what the study is about. As this study is about one Inner London school and looks at African-Caribbean boys within it, it is therefore a bounded study of one institution and one group of students and their teachers.

In summary, case studies involve stories, pictures, action research, leading to ‗fuzzy‘ generalisation (Bassey, 1999) and produce outcomes as ‗interpretations‘. Bassey (1999) is of the view that fuzzy logic is a way of encapsulating the claim to educational knowledge of qualitative empirical research. It is agreed that a fuzzy generalisation cannot compare with the certainty of a scientific generalisation and that the uncertainty of fuzziness of statements which contain qualifiers that are sometimes ‗true‘ contrast with the statistical generalisation of quantitative empirical research which is considered to be true in most cases.

Unlike the experimenter, who manipulates variables to determine the casual significance or the quantitative researcher who asks standardised questions of large, representative samples of individuals, the case study researcher observes the characteristics of an individual unit which could be a child, a clique, a class, a school or a community - with a view to establishing generalisations about the wider population to which the unit belongs. In research generalisation and application are matters of judgment rather than calculation and the task of the case study is to produce an ordered report. Although predictive and retrospective generalisation is also used in case study methodology, as this research is a small study of African- Caribbean boys and their teachers, it is not my intention to ‗generalise‘. However the

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intention will be to attempt to provide pointers that will allow the reader to generalise and develop the arguments about African-Caribbean boys further.

4.10 Benefits and limitations of being a teacher researcher in the institution