Case studies towards the analysis of total social construction

Case study is an irreplaceable sociological strategy for research on social construction. Different from either hypothesis tests or descriptive accounts of social life, case study aims to make a long chain of interpretations from a typical case to the construction of the whole society, by linkages of concrete people, conditions, and situations in a case with other related social, political, and cultural elements all the way through. In other words, the case is not only influenced by the policies made by central or local governments at different levels, but also located in grassroots customs and mores at the bottom. To find these multiple relations horizontally and vertically clustered in a case study, various methods of -graphy must be used, such as geography, cartography, demography, historiography, biography, autobiography, lexicography, and, finally, ethnography. At the same time, however, all these elements and their relations should be activated by eventalization having happened in daily life. Through the types of stimulation of abnormal processes or sublimation of normal rituals in eventalization, the complicated, correlative, and sustainable relationships among social elements are presented as many social mechanisms in different dimensions. On all accounts, the whole scene of society will be opened out as a solid structure by the various points (events), lines (linkages), and plane (mechanism) in three dimensions. As Max Weber said, ‘The causal relations in sociological research would be satisfied as a special explanatory demonstration’.