Case Study Research: design and methods.

A very extensive summary of Robert K. Yin’s famous book "Case Study Research: design and
methods." 4-th edition, 2009. Advise: Read the book first before this summary. (Een zeer
uitgebreide samenvatting van Robert K. Yin's boek "Research: design and methods." 4-th
edition, 2009).

Yin distinguishes the following activities when doing a case study research:
1. Plan
2. Design
3. Prepare (and share your preparation)
4. Collect (sometimes going back to Design when collecting data)
5. Analyse
6. Share

Chapter 1: How to Know Whether and When to Use Case Studies as a Research Method

Your goal is to design good case studies and to collect, present and analyse data fairly. A further
goal is tob ring the case study to closure by writing a compelling report or book. Important is to
follow a rigorous methodological path. Equally important is a dedication to formal and explicit
procedures when doing your research. Also be aware of the fact that different social science
research methods fill different needs and situations for investigating social topics.

A case study is relevant the more your research questions seek to explain some present
circumstances: how and why some social phenomenon works or if your research questions
require an “in-depth” description of some social phenomenon. The focus is none understanding
these social phenomena.

A common misinterpretation is that the various research methods should be arrayed

hierarchically. Many social scientist still believe that case studies are only appropriate for the
descriptive phase, that surveys and histories are appropriate for the descriptive phase, and that
experiments are the only way for doing explanatory or causal inquiries. So case studies are only
a preliminary research method and cannot be used to describe or test propositions.

This hierarchical view, however, may be questioned. Some of the best and most famous case
studies have been explanatory case studies (f.i. Street Corner Society by Williman F. Whyte).
When to use each method?

Method Form of Research Requires Control of Focusses on

Question Behaviour Events? Contemporary Events?
Experiment How, Why? Yes Yes
Survey Who, what, where,
how many, how much? No Yes
Archival Who, what, where,
Analysis how many, how much No Yes/No
History How, why? No No
Case Study How, why? No Yes

If research focusses on what questions, either of two positions arises.

- Explanatory for example what can be learned from a study from a start of startup business?
- What as a form of ‘how many?’. What have been the way’s……

Who and where (or how much or how many) questions are more likely to favor survey methods
or the analysis of archival data, as in economic studies. They are advantageous when the research
goal is to describe the prevalence of a certain phenomenon or to be predictive of a certain
outcome.

In contrast ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions are more explanatory and likely to lead us to the use of
case studies, histories and experiments as the preferred research methods.

The key is to understand that your research questions have both substance – for example what is
my study about and form for example am I asking a who, what, where, why or how question.
Assuming that the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions are to be the focus of the study, a further
distinction among history, case study and experiment is the extent of the investigator’s control
over and access to actual behavioral events.

Histories are preferred when there is virtually no access or control, and can of course be done
about contemporary events: in this situation the method begins to overlap with that of the case
study.

Experiments are done when an investigator can manipulate behavior directly, precisely and
systematically.

The case study is preferred in examining contemporary events, but when the relevant behaviors
can not be manipulated.

So in general the case study has a general advantage when a ‘how’ or ‘why’ question is being
asked about a contemporary set of events over which the investigator has little or no control.
Perhaps the greatest concern has been the lack of rigor of case study research. To many times,the
case study researcher has been sloppy, has not followed systematically procedures, or has
allowed equivocal evidence or biased views to influence the directions of the findings of the
conclusions.

A second concern is that they provide little basis for scientific generalization. The short answer
is that case studies, like experiments, are generalizable to theoretical propositions and not to
populations or universes.

A third concern is that case studies take to long. This incorrectly confuses the case study method
with a specific method of data collection, such as ethnography or participant observation.

Case studies are a form of inquiry that does not depend solely on ethnographic or participant
observer data. You could even do a high level case study without leaving the telephone or the
internet.

A fourth possible objection to case studies has seemingly emerged with the renewal emphasis on
randomized field trials or ‘true experiments’, to establish causal relations. Overlooked has been
the possibility that case studies can offer important evidence to complement experiments.

Different kind of case studies but a common definition

The essence of a case study, the central tendency among all types of case study, is that it tries to
illuminate a decision or set of decisions: why they were taken, how they were implemented, and
with what result (Schramm, 1971, emphasis added)

This definition thus cites cases of “decisions” as the major focus of case studies. Other common
cases include “individuals,” “organisations,” “processes,” “programs,” “neighborhoods,”
“institutions,” and even “events.”

A case study is an empirical inquiry that:

• Investigates a contemporary phenomenon in depth and within its real-life context, especially
when
• The boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident.
In other words you use the case study method because you want to understand a real-life
phenomenon in depth, but such understanding encompasses important contextual conditions –
because they were highly pertinent to your phenomenon of study (e.g. Yin & Davis, 2007)

However a definition of case studies as a research method is necessary.

Because phenomenon and context are not always distinguishable in real life situations, other
technical characteristics, including data collection and data analysis strategies, become the
second part of our technical definition of case studies:

The case study inquiry:

• copes with the technical distinctive situation in which there will be many more variables of
interest than data points (f.i. compared with experiments), and as one result
• Relies on multiple sources of evidence, with data needing to converge in a triangular fashion,
and as another result
• Benefits from the prior development of theoretical propositions to guide data collection and
data analysis.

Case studies include both single and multiple-case studies.

Some case study research goes beyond being a type of qualitative research, by using a mix of
quantitative and qualitative evidence.
Case studies have a distinctive place in evaluation research.

• The most important is to explain the presumed causal links in real-life events that are too
complex for the survey or experimental strategies
• A second application is to describe an intervention and the real-life context in which it
occurred.
• Third, case studies can illustrate certain topics within an evaluation, again in a descriptive mode
• Fourth, the case study strategy may be used to enlighten those situations in which the
intervention being evaluated has no clear single set of outcomes.

Also case studies can be conducted and written with many different motives. These motives vary
from the simple presentation of individual cases to desire to arrive at broad generalizations based
on case study evidence but without presenting any of the case studies separately.

Chapter 2: Designing Case Studies

The next task is to design your case study. For this purpose you need a plan or research design.
The case study is a separate research method that has its own research design.
A research design is a logical plan for getting from here to there, where here may be defined as
the initial set of questions to be answered and there is some set of conclusions (answers) about
these questions.
Between “here” and “there” may be found a number of major steps, including the collection and
analysis of relevant data.
A research plan guides the investigator in the process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting
observations. It is a logical proof that allows the researcher to draw inferences concerning causal
relations among the variables under investigation (Nachmias & Nachmias, 1992)
Another way of thinking about a research design is a “blueprint” for your research dealing with
at least four problems:
• What questions to study
• What data are relevant
• What data to collect
• How to analyse the results

Components of research design

For case studies five components of a research design are especially important:
1. a study’s question.

2. its propositions, if any.

Only if you are forced to state some propostions will you move in the right direction. For
instance, you might think that organisations collaborate because they derive mutual benefits.
This proposition begins to tell you where to look for relevant evidence.
At the same time some studies have a legitimate reason for not having any propositions. This is
the condition-which exists in experiments, surveys and the other research methods alike – which
a topic is the subject of exploration.

3. Its unit(s) of analysis.

This is the defining of what the “case” is. Keep also in mind that each unit of analysis and its
related questions and propositions would call for a slightly different research design and data
collection strategy.
There is often also a need for spatial, temporal, and other concrete boundaries. The desired case
should be a real life phenomenon, not an abstraction. If you want to compare your findings with
previous research, the key definitions in your study should not be idiosyncratic.

4. The logic linking the data to the propositions.

How will you link the data to the propositions? Techniques are for instance pattern matching,
explanation building, time-series analysis, logic models, and cross-case synthesis.

5. The criteria for interpreting the findings.

A major and important alternative strategy is to identify and address rival; explanations for your
findings. If you only think of rival explanations after data collection has been completed, you
will be starting to justify and design a future study, but you will not be helping to complete your
current case study. For this reason, specifying important rival explanations is a part of a case
study’s research design work.

The Role of Theory in Design Work

Covering these preceding five components of research design will effectively force you to begin
constructive a preliminary theory related to your topic of study. Be aware of the differences with
methods such as ethnography and grounded theory. These related methods deliberately avoid
specifying any theoretical propositions at the outset of an inquiry. As a result, students confusing
these methods with case studies wrongly think that, by having selected the case study method,
they can proceed quickly into the data collection phase of their work, and they may have been
encouraged to make their “field contacts” as possible. No guidance could be more misleading.
Among other considerations, the relevant field contacts depend upon an understanding – or
theory – of what is being studied.

Theory development
Having a research question or questions theory development is an essential part of the design
phase.

The simplest ingredient of a theory is a statement such as follows:

“The case study will show why implementation of Management Information System X only
succeeds when the organization was able to re-structure itself, and not just overlay the new MIS
on the old organization structure”.

An additional ingredient could be:

“The case study will also show why the simple replacement of key persons was not sufficient for
successful implementation”
Keep in mind that this second statement presents the nutshell of a ‘rival theory’.

The stated ideas / ingredient will increasingly cover the questions, propositions, units of analysis,
logic connecting data to propositions , and criteria for interpreting the findings.
The simple goal is to have a sufficient blueprint for your study, and this requires theoretical
propositions, usefully noted by Sutton and Staw (1995) as “a (hypothetical) story about why
acts, events, structure and thoughts occur.”

Illustrative types of theories

These are:
* implementation theories;
* individual theories (individual development, cognitive behavior etc.);
* group theories (family functioning, informal groups etc.)
* organizational theories (theories of bureaucracies, organizational structure and functioning
etc.);
* societal theories (theories of urban development, cultural institutions etc.)
Other theories cut across these illustrative types. Decision-making theoryfor instance can involve
individuals, organizations and social groups
Generalizing from case study to theory
Theory development does not only facilitate the collection phase of the ensuing case study. The
appropriate developed theory also is the level at which the generalization of the case study
results will occur.
The role of theory has been characterized throughout this book as “analytical generalization” and
has been contrasted with another way of generalizing results, known as “statistical
generalization”.

In statistical generalization, an inference is made about a population (or universe) is made on the
basis of empirical data collected about a sample from that universe.

A fatal flaw in doing case studies is to conceive of statistical generalization as the method of
generalizing the results of your case study. This is because your cases are not “sampling units”
and should not be chosen for this reason.

Analytical generalization can be used whether your case study involves one or several cases,
which shall be later referenced as single or multiple case studies. You should try to aim towards
analytical generalization in doing case studies and you should avoid thinking in such confusing
terms as “the sample of cases” or “the small sample size of cases,” as if a single – case study
were like a single respondent in a survey or a single subject in an experiment. The replication
logic, whether applied to experiments or to case studies, must also be distinguished from the
sampling logic commonly used in surveys.

The reasons are:

1. Case studies are not the best method for assessing the prevalence of phenomena
2. A case study would have to cover both the phenomenon of interest and its context, yielding a
large number of potentially relevant variables. This would require an impossible large number of
cases – too large to allow any statistical consideration of the relevant variables.
3. If a sampling logic had to be applied to all types of research, many important problems could
not ne empirically investigated.
The methodological differences between these two views are revealed by the different rationales
underlying the replication as opposed to sampling design

Replication logic not sampling logic

Multiple cases resemble multiple experiments. So you need replication logic, not sampling logic,
for multiple-case studies. That means that each case must be carefully selected so that it (a)
predict similar (a literal replication) or (b) predicts contrasting results but for anticipatable
reasons (a theoretical replication). The ability to conduct 6 or 10 case studies, arranged
effectively within a multiple-case design, is analogous to the ability to conduct 6 to 10
experiments on related topics. A few cases (2 or 3) would be literal replications, whereas a few
other cases (4 to 6) might be design to pursue two different patterns of theoretical replications.

For more information about the book: Yin, R.K (2009) Case Study Research: Design and
Methods. London: Sage