Case Study

Overview

[Page 316]In a case study, context-dependent representations are drawn together from the voices, actions, interactions, and creations of people and place. The case study can be formed around representations of the actions and activities of an individual or a single case, such as in law, psychology, or medicine, where detailed development of the case can provide rich and in-depth understandings. Or it can have a broader focus, such as developing an analysis of the general or specific action and activity of a social group or setting.

Rather than being a specific methodological choice in a research design, the selection of case study enables the researcher to choose what will be studied by whatever methods necessary to develop a deep understanding of that case. In this way, a case study is a bounded system, constructed by the researcher. Researchers are led to a case study, not to reduce complexity through focus on a specific phenomenon or practice, but to inquire into the messy complexity of human experience through a naturalistic setting. As such, in constructing the boundaries of a case, the researcher identifies a social unit—for example, one of, or a combination of, a person, a situation, a place, or a social activity that becomes a case of something.

An example of this might be a research study investigating play-based learning in early childhood settings, in which four case studies of early childhood centers are used to study children’s play. In each case study, methods of data generation include interviews with children, staff members, and parents in relation to children’s play, observations of children’s play and staff members’ interaction with children while they play, and finally, analysis of center and regulatory authority’s policies on curriculum and play. In this example, each case study is bounded by the child care center, which becomes a case that is investigating children’s play in an early childhood setting.

Key Elements

Three key elements in how a case study is developed have an impact on how it is understood: It is bounded, it is constructed, and it is represented. Case studies are bounded by what is to be included and what is left out in the collection of data and the writing of the case, constructed through researcher and participant decisions and choices of what is to be foregrounded and backgrounded. Through this bounding and construction, case study becomes a representation of places and practices at a particular point in time.

...