Case Study

Reading Yin’s article this week, I was a little surprised by the fact that case study is a controversial research method.  I haven’t encountered many studies employed case study, thus my impression of this method remains qualitative and interpretive, even slightly essoteric at times, like a psychiatrist journal.

Yin advocates the idea that case study is a series of research strategies that utilize many different methods to collect evident, collect data, and build explanations, yet not necessarily qualitative and narrative. With a clear conceptual framework and careful planning, case study can be executed systematically and orderly with qualitative data and reliable and generalizable results. I like Yin makes a case for case study that, unlike experiment, case study does not separate a phenomenon from its context. The criticism and doubts rose about case study as a research method, such as Miles (1969), are generally due to limited understanding, and Yin reaffirms the definition and related strategies of case study and thus widens its scopes of application. 

Another interesting point is that Yin incorporates qualitative data collection methods into case study, such as tabulation instead of indiscriminately recording every detail to make sure nothing can be missed. He also points out that writing everything down is actually a helpful strategy only with the premises that critical events are clearly identified in research plan, so that researchers can save their energies to focus on events and data that are meaningful to the study.