Chicago School

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

By 1920 the case study method and its data analysis were established in the graduate department of sociology of the University of Chicago. The pioneering and founding work, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, by William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, contributed to the epistemology and methodology of the case study method. First published between 1918 and 1920 as five volumes, Polish Peasant is set around the exchange of letters between Poland and the United States of families of new immigrants along with case records of the lives and living conditions of Polish immigrants written by U.S. assistance agencies.

The coverage details explicit issues of adjustment to leaving Poland and being in the United States. Znaniecki, whom Thomas had met in Warsaw in 1913, talked in Polish to many members of the families to seek corroboration of detail. He is credited as the author of the methodological sections of the Polish Peasant. Znaniecki argued that research aspiring to application must work on special social problems, following the problem in a certain limited number of concrete social groups, studying it in every group with regard to the particular form under the influence of the conditions [Page 141]prevailing in this society. This, as Chicagoan Ernest Burgess observed, was the actual introduction of the case study as method.

However, Znaniecki and Thomas attested during discussion at a meeting organized in 1937 by Herbert Blumer that the theory stated in the Polish Peasant and written after the field work was insufficiently grounded in the data. During the discussion, which was fully transcribed, Thomas said that the behavior document, whether autobiographical, case record, or psychoanalytic exploration, is a more or less systematic record of individual experience, and the claim for the document is that the extensive record of comparison will reveal the general schematization of individual life. Thomas collected about 8,000 items for use in the study, and the authors provided a historical context for the study.