Case Studies: Weblog Entry Details
September 4, 2003
what is a case study? what's in a case study? (Posted by Con at 10:58 a.m.)
These are common questions. I don't have the answers...yet. But I am beginning to see the answer is one of those "it depends" sort of things. This entry attempts to lay out some of those dependencies.
What's a case study? What's in a case study. Well, it depends.
It depends on your overall motivation in preparing a case study. A case study for teaching purposes will tend to be different from a case study for research purposes. Though they may engage the same core scenario, the presentation of the case likely will differ. A teaching case study is usually designed to address the learning of concepts that transcend the individual cases. Thus a teaching case study leverages dialog, stimulates thinking and reasoning, and generally does not present a single solution. A research case study, however, details an experience so a conclusion can be drawn. Research case studies tend to present analysis leading to specific conclusions that synchronize with the overall research.
Another form of case study is used to sell products and services. Sometimes it's hard for a potential customer to envision using an innovative product or service. Cases of prior use are often presented in advertising media to stimulate customer interest and to document the viability of the product or service. This sort of case study does not expose the compexities usually found in teaching or research case studies; instead it attempts to make the product in use seem as simple and obvious as possible. These case studies are not neutral and are designed to "spin" the product or service in as favorable a light as possible. Perhaps we should call these spin case studies.
Likely as not other disctinctions of case studies can be made on the motivation axis. Snipets of cases found in textbooks may be one.
Other axes that differentiate case studies include: application domain (business, medicine, law, HCI, science, etc.), scope (paragraph, page, pages, extensive library, unbounded), media (oral, paper, computer, multi-media, etc.), consumption (read, discussed, investigated, debated, etc.), access (private, community, global), profit (sold, free), and so on.
So what exactly is a case study? I depends on where you are in this rather complex, mulit-dimensional space.
Next: What is common to all case studies?
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