Chapter Two Lauer

For chapter 2 of Lauer and Asher, I'll pick the Emig study on twelfth graders since it's a classic case study, and I should be more familiar with the details. The main research question that guided Emig's work involved asking how the composing process differed for reflexive and extensive writing. Her subjects included 8 twelfth graders from the Chicago region, and there were five girls and three boys. This case study's context meant that Emig, familiar with writing processes, was involved with the students on a rather personal level, as opposed to mere observation. She already had a theory on writing as a process, along with various hypotheses. One, for example, was that the two modes of context would produce writing of different lengths. Her initial questions led to easier coding later in the research process. Regarding data collection, she conducted interviews listened to tape recordings of composing aloud, observed the composing process, and collected writing samples and school records. Her analysis included many variables, such as the context of composing, the nature of the stimulus, prewriting, planning, starting, composing aloud, reformulating, stopping, contemplation of the product and teacher influence.
This study, while dated, remains a classic. I notice it is constantly on reading lists for rhetoric programs. Emig helped pioneer case studies, and while this is a strength for rhetoric's future, there are bound to be problems with her study. It was clearly limited. How do we know these 8 students are representative of twelfth graders? They were not a random sample. Given that her research was highly qualitative (interviews and such), we cannot generalize to the extent that we wish. Of course, the coding is able to produce quantitative data, but I still question just how accurate her findings are. I do think that since she used various methods of data collection that her findings have some merit. Surely a typical twelfth grader will write differently for reflexive versus extensive writing. We might, however, want to know about various ages. Do 7th, 10th, and college students do this as well? Emig's case study leaves some unanswered questions, though more than that it opens the door for more research (which certainly happened). If only today in 2007 something like a case study were considered novel! I question if there are new research methods out there remaining to be discovered.