Doing comparative case study research in urban and regional studies: what can be learnt from practice?

ABSTRACT

Recent years have seen a vivid debate on the epistemological foundations of comparative urban research. Remarkably, comparative case study research practice has remained unaffected by these wider debates and empirical research processes often stay a ‘black box’. Thus, we identify an unmet need for a critical and transparent reflection of conceptual foundations and empirical processes. Based on a review of EU-funded projects in the field of territorial cohesion, we discuss minimum standards of comparative case study research. These standards encompass the theoretical framework of the study, the objective of comparison, questions regarding the ambition to generalize, the case study selection strategy, and potential trade-offs. We conclude that researchers should be more explicit in their way of carrying out comparative research. Eventually, this transparency supports both a fruitful debate on comparative case study designs and the soundness of academic and policy conclusions.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative case study research
• methodological minimum standards
• transparency
• territorial cohesion
• urban and regional studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The study is called RELOCAL (Resituating the Local in Cohesion and Territorial Development). For more information visit www.relocal.eu.

2 https://explore.openaire.eu/search/find/projects.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union's H2020 Society research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement N° 727097. The project's title is “Resituating the Local in Cohesion and Territorial Development”, its acronym is “RELOCAL” and the official Project-ID is “727097”. Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) Annual Congresses 2019 and 2017 as well as the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) 2018.