A case study is one type of research method and qualitative research. A case study is important as it defines as a study involving descriptive information about an individual or a small group of individuals. The result of the case studies is in a narrative description of behavior or experience that is normally qualitative in nature. It is not used to discover generalizable truths or make a prediction and also not used to determine cause and effect. The case study research is more emphasis on the exploration and description of a phenomenon. The central characteristics of the case study research are usually narrowly focused as it provides a specific detail that combines both the objective and subjective data to result in in-depth understanding.
A case study is used to answer questions of how or why rather than quantitative study generally asked questions of who, what, where, how much and how many. A case study is commonly used to collect in-depth data in a natural setting where the researcher has little or no control over the events as there is a real-life context. The main goal of a case study is to deliver information that may research in the formation of a hypothesis for future research. A case study is regularly used in an educational setting and social science research. For example, it is commonly used to study psychological problems such as the development of a child in a broken family or the effects on a student who are being bullied and abused. As for the educational setting that was used for the case study is to explore the development of writing skills in a small group of individuals taking a creative writing class.
There are different types of case study methods as it depends on the goals of the researcher and the nature of the question being asked. The first type of case study method is called illustrative. This type of method is used to describe an event or situation in order to make people be more familiar with the topic in question or perhaps become aware of the terminology associated with the topic. The second type of case study method id called exploratory. This method is a summarize case study as it gathered basic and original data that could be used to categorize a particular question for a larger study. It is an exploratory in nature because it was not designed to produce detailed data from any conclusions.
127 our experts are availableright now
The third type of case study is the cumulative method. The cumulative method commonly designed to pull information together for several situations or event and summative it in a way to allow resulting greater generalization. The cumulative method can save time and money as this method is not creating new and repetitive studies. The fourth method of case study is called critical instance. These studies are used to study situations of certain unique interest or to challenge a universal or generalized belief. These situations or events may be examined to rear questions or to challenge the previous proclamations.
Thus, the researcher will start to design their case study approach once the basic type of case study has been chosen and the question has been recognized. The researcher can use a different range of approaches and methods such as interviews, field studies, protocol or transcript analyses, direct participant observations, a review of documents and achieved records or an exploration of artifacts to collect data in order to gain a full and detailed picture of the participant or small group. Researchers may use a single method approach (one method) or use a multi-modal approach (several methods) to collect data.
The researcher will need to make the decision of the strategy for analyzing the data after he or she has determined the data collection methods and the type of data that will be used and recorded in the study. Typically, case study researchers will interpret their data either holistically or through coding procedures. In a holistic approach, it commonly reviews all the data as a whole and tries to draw conclusions based on the data entirely. It is known as an appropriate approach because the question that being studied is more general and get an overview of the data. Sometimes by breaking the data into smaller pieces might be useful as it involves searching the data to identify and categorize specific actions or characteristics. By assigning a numeric code, it allows the data to be analyzed using statistical in quantitative methods.
There are a few advantages and disadvantages regardless of the type of case study, data collection method or the data analysis method. The first advantages are in the case study; it is more flexible than many other types of research because it eventually allows the researcher to explore and discover the development of the research. Secondly, the case study emphasizes in-depth content that allows the researcher to investigate deep and use a variety of data sources to get a full picture. Furthermore, the data that is collected is in a natural setting and context. Third advantages are case study often resulting in new hypotheses that can be tested later and explore new discovery on a proven theory that can result in further exploration. Lastly, researchers are also able to analyze or study a situation, events, and behaviors. The disadvantages in case studies are that the originality of the data usually cannot be replicated because it has some level of subjectivity and researcher preference may be a problem. It is not possible to conduct the research on a large scale because of the in-depth nature of the data as it concerns about the reliability, validity, and generalizability of the results.
Fortunately, there are some major challenges in conducting case study research. The first challenge is to choose the right research topic. It is important to choose the topic carefully because the research topic is the main groundwork by means the researcher cannot do anything else until he or she figures out the basic focus of their topic. The topic chosen is best when the researcher has an interest in it. The second challenge is on choosing the right methodology for the case study. After a topic is chosen, the researcher needs a methodology in which is a procedure for conducting the research in order to move forward. The researcher sometimes not too sure which method is best suitable to achieve the research aims and objective.
Without confirming the right topic for the appropriate methodology, the research cannot be proceeding further. The third challenge is the problems in using survey questionnaires. Although questionnaire clearly stated that individuals’ own perspective would be valued and there were no right or wrong answers, the researcher noticed that the participants still seemed to search and asking others nearby the right or positive answers rather than expressing their own views. The final challenge is knowing how to dealing with the collected data. The researcher might find out irrelevant data which bring the result of an inaccurate and misinterpreted data collected in the process.
