THEORETICAL CONSTRAINTS IN THE FIRST-PHASE OF A MULTISITE CASE-STUDY OF HEALTH-SERVICES

This article illuminates the difficulties involved in conducting a mul tisite case study of different health services. It confines itself to describing the initial phase of such an inquiry. It argues that both t he methodological and the content-related complexity of such research places great theoretical constraints on the researcher. Such constrain ts should not be resolved by simply applying some pregiven theory If i s shown how theoretical constraints arise in the need to formulate som e notion of comparability for the different sites under investigation. Because such comparability is conceptualized mainly in a confrontatio n with the empirical data, the description of the process contains sev eral reformulations of the research problem, taking note of various pi tfalls and stumbling blocks. Finally the general results of the pilot study are reported.