THE LOGIC OF GENERALIZATION - 5 PRINCIPLES COMMON TO EXPERIMENTS AND ETHNOGRAPHIES

Both experiments and ethnographies are highly localized so they are of ten criticized for lack of generalizability. The present article descr ibes a logic of generalization that may help solve such problems. The logic consists of five principles outlined by Cook (1990): (a) proxima l similarity (b) heterogeneity of irrelevancies, (c) discriminant vali dity, (d) empirical interpolation and extrapolation, and (e) explanati on. Because validity is a property of knowledge claims, not methods, t hese five principles apply to claims about generalization generated by any method, including both ethnographies and experiments. The princip les are illustrated using Rizzo and Corsaro's interesting ethnographie s as examples.