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After reading this article you will learn about the criteria for evaluating the adequacy of the case history or life history which is of central importance for case study.
(1) The subject must be viewed as a specimen in a cultural series. That is, the case drawn out from its total context for the purposes of study must be considered a member of the particular cultural group or community. The scrutiny of the life histories of persons must be done with a view to identifying the community values, standards and their shared way of life.
(2) The organic motors of action must be socially relevant. That is, the action of the individual cases must be viewed as a series of reaction to social stimuli or situation. In other words, the social meaning of behaviour must be taken into consideration.
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(3) The strategic role of the family group in transmitting the culture must be recognized. That is, in as much as the individual case is a member of a family, the role of the family in shaping his behaviour must never be overlooked.
(4) The specific method of elaboration of organic material onto social behaviour must be clearly shown. That is, case histories that portray in detail how basically a biological organism, the man, gradually blossoms forth into a social person, are especially fruitful.
(5) The continuous, related character of experience from childhood through adulthood must be stressed. In other words, the life history must be a Gestalt or configuration depicting the inter-relationships between the person’s various experiences. Such a Gestalt affords a comprehensive understanding of a person’s life as a continuum.
(6) The ‘social situation’ must be carefully and continuously specified as a factor. One of the important criteria for the life history is that a person’s life must be shown as unfolding itself in the context of and partly owing to, specific social situations.
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(7) The life history material itself must be organized according to some conceptual framework, this in turn would facilitate generalizations at a higher level. The criteria just discussed stress the specific chain of coordinated, related continuous and configured experiences in a cultural pattern which motivate social and personal behaviour.
The criteria laid down by Dollard are principally perfect but some of these are hard to materialize and to be translated into practice. Dollard tried to articulate the diverse events depicted in the life histories of persons in the course of repeated interviews, utilizing psychoanalytical techniques in particular situational contexts. His criteria of life history emanate directly from this experience.
While the life histories have their independent importance as research documents, the interviews of their writers can afford, as Dollard observes, rich insights into the nature of the social situations experienced by them.
A person’s life is quite complex indeed. There is till date no technique that can bring in some kind of uniformity and consequently, ensure the cumulativeness of case history materials by disentangling the complex totality that is human life.
But although case data are not amenable to rigorous analysis, a skillful handling and interpretation of such data may help developing insights into cultural conflicts and problems born out of culture change.