Modified: 2007-01-31
The simplest type of small-N research is the case study or case history. In a case study, a researcher closely studies a single person or a single group. Usually, the researcher does not attempt any experimental manipulations.
Fabrega (2004) presents case studies of two men who committed homicides. Both were “residents of a medium-large American city and one can assume that they understood and knew its culture of law” (p. 182). Both men were eventually convicted of first-degree murder. One man, referred to as Mr. H, killed his wife of 8 years by stabbing her following her announced decision to divorce him, take their two children, and make him leave their home. The other man, Mr. A, was an avowed racist who killed four men of another race after an altercation at his apartment with a maintenance worker of another race. He told the maintenance worker, “You’re a dead man” (p. 181) just before retrieving his gun and loading it. Not finding the worker when he returned, he instead killed another maintenance worker and later three patrons at nearby fast food restaurants. All of the victims were of a different race than the killer and he spared potential victims of his own race at both homicide locations. During the shootings, witnesses described Mr. A as, “calm, controlled, and methodical” (p. 192).
Mr. A had a long history of contact with mental health professionals. He had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and had been given Haloperidol (an anti-psychotic drug), but refused to continue the drug treatment and had been dropped from therapy. Fabrega analyzed the cultural differences surrounding both killers, closely examining their respective lives, culture, clinical histories, events precipitating the homicides, and events during the day of the homicides. Fabrega concluded that determinations of guilt depend on factors beyond factual ones and include the emotional, political, and historical implications that have been presented to juries, and to the media. As we pointed out in chapter 1 (p. xx), juries do not make decisions scientifically (Devine et al., 2001). Fabrega, too, concludes that scientific formulations alone cannot totally account for society’s decisions about homicide. Culture, in many ways and both directly and indirectly, affects society’s decisions too. Both of the cases, although quite different, reveal the complex interaction of law, psychiatry, and culture.