The importance of case study research?

There are a numbers of definitions of case study; however, some of them are wrong or misleading. I myself find that this definition of case study is neutral: The case study is a research strategy that focuses on understanding the dynamics present within single settings. Although case studies are widely used, case study is hardly held as a methodology. Indeed, the research method is poorly understood (Flyvbjerg 2011). The author lists 5 misunderstandings about case study.

 

The first misunderstanding is: General, theoretical knowledge is more valuable than concrete case knowledge. I totally agree with the author that we cannot say which one is more important: theoretical knowledge or context-dependent case. Although rule-based knowledge is important, the person who only trained in context-dependent knowledge and rules is only at the beginner’s level. To become an expert, they must possess intimate knowledge of several thousand concrete context-dependent cases in their areas of expertise. In research perspective, human behavior cannot be meaningfully understood as simply the rule-governed acts; as a result, there does not and probably cannot exist predictive theory in social science. In this context, cases are important for researchers’ own learning processes in developing the skills needed to do good research.

The second misunderstanding is: One cannot generalize on the basis of an individual case; therefore, the case study cannot contribute to scientific development. To attack this argument, the author argue that generalization is just one of the skills that researcher must possess, which leads him to conclude that generalization is overvalued. When a person learns something, one of his purposes is that he wants to apply the lessons that he learns. Generally, a lesson that he can generalize is the lesson that is more likely to be applied. Thus, human tends to pay interest to knowledge that can be generalized, which misleads themselves that such knowledge is more important. However, there is no direct positive correlation between applicability and degree of importance. And even knowledge that cannot be formally generalized can contribute to the body of knowledge, so saying that case study cannot contribute to the scientific development is wrong.

To strengthen his argument, the author continues by saying that case study contributes to the theory development by testing hypotheses.  For example, in Galileo’ rejection of Aristotle’s law of gravity, the matter was settled by an individual case due to the clever choice of the extremes of metal and feather. The author concludes that case study is well suited for identifying “black swans” – the evidence to prove that one hypothesis is wrong. However, in my opinion, the author leaves a hole in his argument here. It seems to me that OK, the one can generalize on the basis of an individual case, but the result of the generalization is a “black swan”. The author didn’t give examples of other types of result of the generalization from one case.

In fact, (Eisenhardt 1989) has established the Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research which has 8 steps: Getting Started, Selecting Cases, Crafting Instruments and Protocols, Entering the Field, Analyzing Data, Shaping Hypotheses, Enfolding Literature, Reaching Closure. (See Figure 1). Including this in the paper will make his argument more persuasive and also will reader more insight into how to actually build theory from case study.

 Figure 1: 8 steps of building theory from case study research

One more thing to add, since the author specify which case is suitable to do case study, to avoid bias, the author should also gives some comments on which case is not suitable to do case study, or the weakness of case study research. In my opinion, some weakness of case study that can be listed here are: the intensive use of empirical evidence can yield theory which is overly complex (Imagine that you do the case study and obtain a large volume of rich data, there is a temptation to build theory which tries to capture everything) and building theory from cases may result in narrow and idiosyncratic theory. (Case study theory building is a bottom up approach such that the specifics of data produce the generalizations of theory. The risks are that the theory describes a very idiosyncratic phenomenon or that the theorist is unable to raise the level of generality of the theory)

REFERENCE

Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989) 'Building Theories from Case Study Research.', Academy of Management Review. Oct89, 14(4), 532.

Flyvbjerg, B. (2011) 'Case Study' in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 4th ed., 301-31.