ABSTRACT
As one might imagine, since every social science and humanities field has something to say about families, there are many different approaches to family study. We can look at families historically or ethnographically, we can report group or aggregate data (on 1, 10, 1,000, or 10,000 families), we can clinically interview family members, we can observe family interaction. Any particular approach to families will be a product of the interaction of theory, method, and empirical claim, and the relations among these three are also variable. This section of Family, Self and Society presents case studies of families. Calvin Settlage and his coworkers, Isabel Bradburn and Joan Kaplan, and John Clausen, all, in providing case material, give us a sense of the people behind, or within, their studies. We learn from them about the potential contribution of case material, and they indicate for us how differently and for what different purposes case material can be presented. We see three particular instances of the intertwining of theory, method, and result.
