Yin and Stake Philosophical Worldviews My perspective as a qualitative doctoral researcher more closely aligns with Yin’s worldview than with Stake’s. As Yazan (2015) notes, Yin’s approach to case study research was rather systematic: he wanted to ensure that researchers could apply the case study design by following a standardized method that would allow the design to be used as a legitimate method of research in the social sciences. Yin’s perspective was positivistic in the sense that he believed “objectivity, validity and generalizability” could be achieved in case study research (Yazan, 2015, p. 136). As Yazan (2015) also points out, Yin believed that case study research should “maximize four conditions related to design quality: construct validity, internal validity, external validity, and reliability” (p. 137). Validity and reliability were yardsticks that Yin suggested every case study researcher keep in mind when conducting research and have available so as to constantly be mindful of the usefulness and utility of the research and whether or not it would be viewed favorably by other researchers in the field. By focusing on validity and reliability in case study research, Yin wanted to show that it was possible for this type of study to meet the necessary conditions of validity and reliability in order to show other researchers exactly how the findings were obtained and why the study measured what it set out to measure.

For me, I believe Yin’s philosophical...

Positivism is a philosophical belief that all rational and justifiable statements can be verified scientifically. I hold this same belief because science is really the act of verifying reality. So if a statement or assertion is logical, rational and true, it should be able to be verified scientifically. The opinion that Yin holds is that case study research can produce legitimate, rational and logical findings that are true and thus they can also be verified scientifically. That is why he places so much emphasis on maintaining mindfulness of validity and reliability.
Stake’s philosophical worldview was based more upon the ideas of existentialism and constructivism (Yazan, 2015). In other words, Stake viewed that everyone constructs their own meaning and their own sense of what it is to exist. This perspective places more emphasis on the subjective experience than on the objective experience. As a researcher, I believe that the objective evidence should be the primary focus and that, even if one is examining the experience of a participant or a case study subject, that personal experience which has so many subjective facets can still be studied objectively—and that is the argument that Yin makes. Stake, on the other hand, held the opinion that “knowledge is constructed rather than discovered” (Yazan, 2015, p. 137). For stake, there is less focus on the importance of validity and reliability in qualitative research. The…