ABSTRACT
CASE analysis is a technique which may be, and usually is, employed for the purpose of clarifying historical data. The basic material of a case is a description of an event which has occurred so far in the past as to allow for isolation, delimitation, and abstraction. In most instances the person who analyses the case material is not the same person who has had first-hand contact with the event ; consequently, the analyser is compelled to construct meanings and interpretations which are, essentially, thrice removed from reality. Analysis of this sort is, obviously, subject to the vagaries of individual gradients, since no two persons are likely to arrive at the same conception of meanings from the given data of any specific case. This liability of historical case analysis has led to the wish for techniques which might come nearer the current event. Social scientists, as well as all other scientists, are eager to discover ways of analysing the living present, the fleeting event which can never be reconstructed with fidelity once memory is called upon to intervene.
