xmas reading from amazon

My most recent purchases from amazon.com have arrived just in time for the xmas break from the office. I bought Yin's Case Study Research and Yin's edited The Case Study Anthology. I started my reading of the anthology with Yankee City: The social life of a modern community. This material was first published in 1941 so a couple of years before Street Corner Society was published and a long time before Yin's first edition of Case Study Research. Design and Methods.

Here is a little bit that i enjoyed reading from Yankee City.

"When the research on Yankee City began, the director wrote a description of what he believed was fundamental in our social system, in order that the assumptions he held be explicitly stated and not become unconscious biases which could distort the fieldwork, later analysis, and ultimate conclusions. If these assumptions could be stated as hypotheses, they were then subject to criticism by collection of data that would prove, modify, or disprove them. Most of the several hypotheses so stated were subsumed under a general economic interpretation of human behaviour in society. It was believed that the fundamental structure of our society, that which ultimately controls and dominates the thinking and actions of our people, is economic, and the most vital and far-reaching value systems which motivate Americans are to be ultimately traced to an economic order. Our first interviews tended to sustain this hypothesis…Other evidence began to accumulate that made it difficult to accept a simply economic hypothesis." (Warner & Lunt, 2004, p. 38)

Neat.

This all led to me doing a search for similar studies, and I found this site which provides information about other studies of communities.