Theme 6, part 2: Qualitative and Case Study Research

When writing my pretext of this week’s theme, I did not fully understand the concept of a case study. Fortunately, my understanding of what a case study is was clarified during the seminar.

There are two things that define a case study regarding how to use this method. Firstly, it is important to have a specific scenario or a limited research area to perform a case study at. One example is to use personas (a fake person that corresponds to the typical user in a target group).  You can use one or several scenarios to perform the case study at. Secondly, a case study is defined by its method. A case study consists of a number of different methods. It can be both qualitative and quantitative methods, only qualitative methods or only quantitative methods.

During the seminar we discussed benefits and limitations concerning case studies. The obvious benefit is that you are never short on data when conducting a case study but at the same time too much data can also be a problem.  I think that if you have the time as a researcher it is a good idea to use both qualitative and quantitative methods. Then you minimize the risk of having too short answers from only quantitative methods and too few participants from only qualitative methods.

When doing case studies and getting a lot of raw data it can be hard to know what to do with all the information and to know what data is most important. What I thought was interesting was that Leif´s answer to this was to do more case studies. In that way one can see what a case has in common with other case studies and find the most important stuff. To generate a general theory it takes four to ten case studies. That means a lot of work but hopefully, it also means a great result!