Introduction

In the Transitions project we set out to examine how European men and women working in public and private sector workplaces negotiate motherhood and fatherhood and work–family boundaries in the context of different national welfare state regimes, family and employer support. We adopted a life course perspective, as described in Chapter Two. This enabled us to situate the transition to – and experience of – parenthood within the various structural and social domains in which individuals create their careers in work, education, and as partners and parents. It focused on seven countries in Eastern and Western Europe and on two types of work organisations: social services in the public sector and finance companies in the private sector (Nilsen and Brannen, 2005; Lewis and Smithson, 2006a).

The study has two main methodological features. First, it adopted a comparative qualitative approach. Second, it adopted an embedded case study design (Yin, 2003) in which working parents were studied with reference to three analytic levels: the macro level of national public policy provision; the organisational level of employer policies and provision and informal support in the workplace; and the individual level, the biographical trajectories of working parents. The contextualisation of individual lives facilitates the process of cross-national comparison and generates both differences and similarities within and across national settings.

The research design of Transitions requires a consideration of a number of methodological issues. In this book we address topics that relate to biographical methods and to comparative cross-national research. First, we examine some theoretical issues involved in cross-national, case-based research. Next, we set out the criteria used for the selection of cases of the parents in the study at the design stage and in the subsequent comparative analysis which form the basis of the subsequent chapters. Finally, we offer a few recommendations based on working with the approach.

Cross-national comparative case-based research

Comparative case-based research is a large field encompassing a number of perspectives, theories and methodological approaches. Space does not permit an extensive overview of these, nor indeed is that our ambition here. We confine ourselves to a limited set of concerns that directly relate to the type of cross-national comparative research in which we have been involved.