The methodological challenge to comparative research

Abstract

However, there is some question about the methodological strength and theoretical contribution of this work. Whilst grand studies of multiple housing systems have breadth, they often lack focus and creative, explanatory insight. Research that attempts to quantify characteristics of unique case studies into neatly comparable fixed categories misses their spatially and temporally patterned unevenness. In doing so, such research forfeits any explanation of policy change and difference. A singular focus on big processes, uniform directions and international generalizations blinds the researcher to the unique, dynamic, interactive and local nature of housing systems. Policy-oriented research, particularly that comparing West European nations, is particularly vulnerable to this critique. Whilst comparison of policy mechanisms has been prolific, progress in theoretical explanation has been partial. In some cases explanation has been impeded by the dominant positivist drive to compare consistent categories of singular housing characteristics between nations. This approach is fundamentally flawed. Such research founders not only through simple problems of data validity, but also more ontologically through its conception of 'closed' social reality. Reality is empirically perceived as something that can be quantified and compared. For this reason, Kemeny's warning of "the dead hand of mindless empiricism" is warranted (Kemeny, 1995, p. xi). More conceptual work is needed to reveal the complex, structured reality of housing systems and develop suitable conceptual tools to explain difference and change. Kemeny (1992, 1995) is not alone, nor the first, to stress the need for housing research that is more engaged with debates in the social sciences. In 1990 the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) convened a large workshop in Paris on comparative research. It emphasized the need for