Bassey (2001) here deals with the long standing problem of causality in social research. He suggests that there is a middle way between giving up on the search for causality as an impossible enterprise and the kind of naive whole hearted commitment to generalisability within the positivist tradition. More precisely he suggests that some kind of generalisation is possible arising out of case study. In this paper you may want to think about the following:

The paper uses the terms open generalisation; predictive generalisation; and theoretical inference. Are these the same things?

Social research is compared to natural science, do you go along with the parallels in the paper?

Does fuzzy sound 'fuzzy' to you?

To what extent can practice be informed by generalisations - fuzzy or otherwise.

After reading the paper discuss the applicability of these key ideas for your own field of research or academic discipline.

Bassey, M. (2001) A solution to the problem of generalisation in educational research: Fuzzy Prediction, Oxford Review of Education, 27, 1, 5-22