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Rob WalkerCentre for Applied Research in Education University of East Anglia

What is a Case Study?(The use of case studies in research and evaluation)

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If you don’t read anything else - read this!

Robert E Stake The Art of Case Study Research. Thousand Oaks Ca. Sage 1995

‘Case study is the study of the particularity and complexity of a single case…[emphasising] … episodes of nuance, the sequentiality of happenings in context, the wholeness of the individual.’

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Some sources

http://www.uea.ac.uk/care

people->Rob Walker-> Teaching Folio/Recent Writing

http://icare.typepad.com/research_journal_india/

http://www.col.org/resources/startupguides/prest.htm

A4 Getting and using qualitative data

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• Researcher: Tell me what qualitative methods means, Does it mean that I can do research without having to do statistics?

• Adviser There are some who define qualitative methods as a way of doing ‘research with words, rather than research with numbers’ but to do so suggests that qualitative researchers never use numbers (which is not true) and that quantitative research does not use words (equally untrue). Most researchers have a more complex view. Some qualitative researchers claim that the key difference is that they emphasise ‘depth’ of understanding rather than aiming for generalisation. . . .

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Some preliminary claims

• Case study is not a method: case study uses methods

Harry Torrance (and others) describe case study ‘as an approach’

• Case study is inherently conservative

Case studies aim to describe things as they are, not as they might be or could be

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Some key current problems/issues

• EthicsPrincipled procedures vs protocols

• Authorship

Researcher as author

Readerly writing and writerly writing

• ParticipationDemocratic evaluation and action research

• New and emerging technologies

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What is the question to which ‘case study’ is an answer?

• Why case studies have proved useful in program evaluation

• Paradigm debates among academics

• Case studies and the practitioner (action research)

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What is a case study?

• Story telling -> Case study -> Ethnography (Terry Denny)

• The collection (not the making) of judgments, perceptions and narratives (Stake)

• ‘Realist’, ‘confessional’ and ‘impressionistic’ tales (John van Maanen)

• Selection in terms of issues (organised and edited)

• Including response and building dialogue

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Triangulation

Triangulation is a key to validity but:

‘The stronger one’s belief in constructed reality, the more difficult it is to believe that any complex observation or interpretation can be triangulated’

Robert Stake 1995 (p 114)

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Common questions

• How representative are single samples? (plus reliability and validity issues)

• Problems of observation and the observer

• Case studies and case records (Stenhouse)

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Further References

• Stake, R.E. (1995)The Art of Case Study Research, Thousand Oaks Ca.: Sage

• Denny, T. unpublished paper 1977• Stenhouse, L.A. (1978) ‘Case study and case records:

Towards a contemporary history of education’. British Educational Research Journal, 4(2), 21-39

• Somekh B, & Lewin, C. (2004) eds Handbook of Research Methods for the Social Sciences, London: Sage

• Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales from the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press