![]() ![]() ![]() Not only can they give you information, they can tell whether the timing was important. Look at documents such as their old school records. Interview the women, their families, their teachers, and anyone else who seems relevant. You can select your case studies from among women who seem to illustrate the pattern, and build a picture of them. This is what a case study is good for: showing how factors and circumstances come together over time. Let us say you did a survey of these women and found certain patterns emerging: they had a dynamic headmistress at school, a supportive parent, were good at a particular subject, took a particular approach toward life, and so on. What made the difference in these women's lives? Case studies use almost all the research techniques in the social scientist's tool kit. Suppose you have found that while most girls from poor rural backgrounds grow up to live in poverty and to do the same work that their parents performed, others become professionals, large-scale entrepreneurs, political figures, and so on. Experienced researchers can also use case studies as the main form of research in a study (see Yin 1989 for a discussion of this approach.)Īs a beginning researcher, you could probably make the best use of case studies to get some initial insights into a situation or to illustrate patterns you have discovered. You can use case studies at the beginning of an investigation to obtain enough understanding to create appropriate questions and choose appropriate techniques to illustrate patterns you have identified using other methods to show variations on a pattern that you have identified, that is, how it manifests itself in different ways to show exceptions and to show the difference between the ideal and the real (what people say they would like to do and what they really do in various circumstances). You can do case studies of individuals (girls who have become pregnant and managed to stay in school), of programs (the kinds of programs that enable them to do so), of aspects of organizations and institutions (why a school has closed), and of processes (how staff of a particular department make decisions). In a case study, you examine attitudes, behaviors, and the environment all together, in a natural setting, to give you a better understanding of how things work. If you added up all the answers to 1,000 questionnaires on parents' attitudes toward the value and costs of education, you could assemble them to produce a picture of the dynamics of how, when resources are scarce, a family decides which children go to school and which do not. ![]() ![]() Both case studies and participation have built-in triangulation: each involves using a variety of approaches to get a better understanding of what you are studying.Ĭase studies provide insights into how and why something works in real life. You may remember that in chapter 7 we emphasized the importance of triangulation of techniques, that is, using several techniques to get the same information. It can be used to get preliminary information, to check other information, and to understand something in its larger context. Participant observation is a strategy for interviewing, observing, and sometimes participating. They are good for showing how something happens or works in a real life situation. Here they are, because both are strategies, that is, combinations of techniques, rather than single ones.Ĭase studies allow you to collect and present information in a way that provides more context. Two qualitative strategies: case studies and participant observationĬase studies and participant observation are not usually grouped together. ![]()
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