Case Study Research: Design and Methods (Yin)

Chapter 1

The more your questions seek to explain some present circumstance (e.g. "how" or "why" some social phenomenon works), the more that the case study method will be relevant. The method also is relevant the more that your questions require an extensive and "in-depth" description of some social phenomenon. (4)

Key Questions:

1. How do you define the "case" being studied?
2. How do you determine the relevant data to be collected?
3. What do you do with the data, once collected? (4)

...the rigorous and fair presentation of empirical data (5),

Many social scientists still deeply believe that case studies are only appropriate for the exploratory phase of an investigation, that surveys and histories are appropriate for the descriptive phase, and that experiments are the only way of doing explanatory or causal inquiries. This hierarchical view reinforces the idea that case studies are only a preliminary research method and cannot be used to describe or test propositions. (6)

Exploratory case studies

Explanatory case studies

Descriptive case studies (7-8)

Three conditions for a case study:

a. the type of research question being posed

b. the extent of control an investigator has over actual behavioral events

c. the degree of focus on contemporary as opposed to historical events

a. 

Exploratory: What? (e.g. What do undergraduate students participating in writing internships learn about writing?)

Explanatory: How and why questions are more explanatory...and likely to lead to the use of case studies (9) (e.g. How do undergraduate students acclimate to the new composing environment of an internship site?).

To summarize, the first and most important condition for differentiating among the various research methods is to classify the type of research question being asked. In general, "what" questions may be either exploratory (in which case, any of the methods could be used) or about prevalence (in which case surveys or the analysis of archival records would be favored). "How and "why" questions are likely to favor the use of case studies, experiments, or histories. (10)

...the form of the question can provide an important clue regarding the appropriate research method to be used. (10-11)

b. 

The case study is preferred in examining contemporary events, but when the relevant behaviors cannot be manipulated. (11)

Experiments are done when an investigator can manipulate behavior directly, precisely, and systematically. This can occur in a laboratory setting, in which an experiment may focus on one or two isolated variables (11)

The advantage of the case study, when:

A "how" or "why" question is being asked about:

• a contemporary set of events,
• over which the investigator has little or no control

Novices may think that the purpose of a literature review is to determine the answers about what is known on a topic; in contrast, experienced investigators review previous research to develop sharper and more insightful questions about the topic. (14)

Problems with Case Studies:

1. Lack of rigor (sloppily done).
2. A second common concern about case studies is that they provide little basis for scientific generalization.

The short answer is that case studies are generalizable to theoretical propositions and not to populations or universes. In this sense, the case study, like the experiment, does not represent a "sample," and in doing a case study, your goal will be to expand and generalize theories (analytic generalization) and not to enumerate frequencies (statistical generalization). (15)

Defining Case Studies

Another problem has been to confuse case studies with ethnographies or with participant-observation...(17)

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. (18)

In other words, you would use the case study method because you wanted to understand a real-life phenomenon in depth, but such understanding encompassed important contextual conditions--because they were highly pertinent to your phenomenon of study. (18)

The case study inquiry

• copes with the technically distinctive situation in which there will be many more variables of interest than data points, and as one result
• relies on multiple sources of evidence, with data needing to converge in a triangulating fashion, and as another result 
• benefits from the prior development of theoretical propositions to guide data collection and analysis (18)

Yes, case study research includes both single- and multiple-case studies. (19)

Case studies can cover multiple cases and then draw a single set of "cross-case" conclusions. (20)

Chapter 2

A research design is the logic that links the data to be collected (and the conclusions to be drawn) to the initial questions of study. (24)

collecting
analyzing
interpreting

Five Components of Research Design:

1. Study questions:

To identify questions, a helpful hint is to move in three stages:

• try to use the literature to narrow your interest to a key topic or two, not worrying about any specific research question
• examine closely--even dissect--a few key studies on your topic of interest. Identify the questions in those few studies and whether they conclude with new questions or loose ends for future research
• examine another set of studies on the same topic (28)

2. Study Propositions

The purpose of this study is to try to understand 1) the processes by which undergraduates students acclimate to workplaces and their attendant discursive practices and 2) what interns learn about professional writing during their internships. 

3. Study Unit(s) of Analysis

...in the classic cast study, a "case" may be an individual...In each situation an individual person is being studied, and the individual is the primary unit of analysis. Information about the relevant individual would be collected, and several such individuals or "cases" might be included in a multiple-case study. (29)

...each case study and unit of analysis either should be similar to those previously studied by others or should innovate in clear, operationally defined ways. In this manner, the previous literature also can become a guide for defining the case and unit of analysis. (33)

4. the logic linking the data to the propositions

5. the criteria for interpreting the findings (27)

Moving Beyond the Academic Community Transitional Stages in Professional Writing (Anson/Forsberg)

Details of their Study

• Internships were full-time positions (10-15 weeks)
• Sponsors for the positions were quite varied, including major corporations, small businesses, public service agencies, local utilities, newspaper offices, and art museums. 
• Instead of using a traditional pedagogy, that is, presenting principles of composition or asking the students to write practice essays, we taught the internship course as a workshop involving group analyses of the participants' work-related drafts and discussions of issues in their writing. One of us (Forsberg) played the role of teacher/ evaluator, coordinating the classes, leading the discussions, making assignments, and assessing the students' work at the end of the course. The other (Anson) played the role of participant observer, attending the sessions, taking notes, joining in the discussions as appropriate, and reflecting on the issues raised by the group. In this way, we were able to gather and analyze data from two different perspectives: (a) helpful (though finally authoritative) facilitator, and (b) interested and engaged observer. (205) 
• We collected everything that the interns were writing, in both draft and final form. We kept logs of data and speculations arising from the group discussions. We asked the interns to keep a course journal in which they explored their thoughts about (a) writing on the job, (b) the texts they were seeing there, and (c) whatever guidance or suggested revisions they were getting from their super visors or fellow employees. We also conducted a series of general and "discourse-based" interviews (Odell, Goswami, & Herrington, 1983), which we tape-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. At regular intervals during the course, we also asked the interns to turn on a tape recorder and reflect aloud on their experiences. For their final course paper, interns produced a 10-to15-page retrospective analysis of their writing on the job. (205)
• In selecting the six case-study subjects, we favored students who would be doing a considerable amount of writing on the job and who had performed well as academic writers. Because we wanted to examine the transitions of fairly competent writers, we limited our selection of majors to English and journalism, both of which provide students with a fairly strong background in writing and communication skills. Beyond these preferences, we aimed for as much diversity as possible in the subjects' age, prior experience, attitudes, and intern ship positions. (206)

Participants: 

• Jim, 20, a journalism major, worked for a nonprofit educational organization in Minneapolis, writing public relations materials. Jim had previously worked in telephone sales. 
• Louise, 21, an English major, worked for a nonprofit arts organization, researching and writing request letters and grants. Louise had previously worked for a short time as a secretary in a small firm. 
• Joan, 35, a returning student, was completing a journalism degree. She worked as an intern for a very small public relations agency, writing pitch letters and press releases. Joan had been a clerical worker for a large corporation. 
• Paula, 38, also a returning student, was completing an English degree. She worked as an unpaid feature writer for a weekly suburban newspaper. She had worked as an administrative assistant in a government office. 
• Rachel, 22, was an English major working as an intern for a two-person company that caters theme parties for corporations. She was mainly responsible for writing brochures and letters. Rachel had previously worked as a secretary in a bank. 
• Betsy, 21, an English major, worked as an intern in a large, nonprofit theater organization, writing public relations and fund-raising materials. She had previously worked for the Red Cross and a small theater group.

Issues to Examine

• how writers in a new context perceive and adapt to complex and unfarniliar audiences
• how they learn to use the lan guage of their workplace
• how they make connections and distinctions between experiential and academic learning, 
• how they describe the influence of the context on their texts
• how they revise those texts, and what motivates their revisions (207)

Key Findings

Our research shows that becoming a successful writer is much more a matter of developing strategies for social and intellectual adaptations to different professional communities than acquiring a set of generic skills, such as learning the difference between the passive and the active voice. (201)

On Concision

In school, it's always expand, expand, expand. Here they want the information quick, and so we gotta give them (201).

Problems with Their Study:

1. They write:

In this study, we chose to focus on an important transition that all writers must make when they move beyond the academic community and begin working in professional settings. Our subjects were six college seniors at the University of Minnesota who were conducting professional internships in and around the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Because most of these students had little or no experience writing in a professional setting but had become quite accustomed to writing at a major university, we felt that the differences in the two types of contexts would reveal the problems that writers face when moving between discourse communities and thus suggest more clearly some of the adaptive processes that writers undergo in new professional settings. (205)

If we are interested in studying, as they seem to be, the "transitions" that writers make from academic to professional settings, studying interns is the wrong way to go. Interns occupy a liminal space--neither students nor fully professionals. So, interns are not a good "unit of analysis" to study to try to understand how undergraduates acclimate themselves to professional discourse communities because their commitment to their professional settings is not the same as that of actual professionals, starting their first job. This seems like an important point. If we are going to study interns, we should focus on them as interns, not as newcomers to a professional environment. Interns are not necessarily novitiate professional writers and may not give us clues as to what newcomers to a discourse community experience or need. They occupy a kind of third space with its own identity features/needs, etc.

This passage further supports the problem I am pointing to:

Instead, they were aware simply that they straddled two contexts— one academic and one professional—and that in the former, they would be analyzing and coming to a fuller understanding of what they were doing in the latter. (206)

They weren't really in the professional context. Their investment and identification was different than what it would have been for those collecting a paycheck.

2.

Findings

During the course of their internships, the students appeared to pass through several distinct stages as they adjusted to their writing contexts— stages marked by qualitative differences in the way they described their writing. This pattern became even more discernible when, focusing on our accumulating data, we saw the same cycle of transition in all the accounts, regardless of the student's age, previous experience or academic writing skill, or specific work context. Within this cycle, the exact point at which a student experienced each stage, with what intensity, and for what length of time, varied considerably according to both the individual and the nature of the workplace, but that variance in itself suggests some new ways of thinking about the interplay between the individual writer and the writing context. (207)

In order to write at all, in order to produce texts that become transactionally real, writers must first be able to adopt a persona appropriate to their position in the workplace, acceptable to themselves, their superiors, and other eventual audiences of their writing. Although the word "audience" seems woefully inadequate here, it is a process of audience analysis that enables the adoption of such a persona, and there is no understanding of audience that more fully constitutes a text than the writer's perception of his or her immediate context, the workplace. The writer must first become a "reader," and the process of that reading must occur in a dynamic context of interpersonal action and adaptation (see Forsberg, 1987). The cycle of transition, then, impinges on and eventually informs writing decisions in the ongoing process of creating texts. (207)