The article questions two tendencies present in a great part of the qualitative investigations labeled "case studies" in the field of education: the first considers that any enquiry that focus on just one unity is a case study; the second supposes that, since the interest in the "case" is due to its uniqueness, there is no need or way of relating it to the current discussion in the area. With the objective of contributing to deal with these problems, the article tries to examine, in the available literature, two essential aspects of the proposed discussion: a) the nature of case studies; b) the issue of generalization of the knowledge generated by that type of research to other contexts. Based on the positions of two of the most prestigious specialists in case studies - Robert Yin e Robert Stake - criteria to evaluate if a given study can or cannot be classified as a case study are discussed. Also, alternatives to statistical generalization offered by those authors are given.
CASE STUDY; YIN, ROBERT; STAKE, ROBERT; EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH