Case Study Research

Herodotus (c 450 BCE) describes how the Persians used medical cases to help ill patients:
They have no physicians, but when a man is ill, they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease themselves or have known any one [sic] who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their own case, or in the case known to them; and no one is allowed to pass the sick man in silence without asking him what his ailment is

1.7. A story is central to a case study

inappropriate acrimonious debate

A case study in academic research is a term used to describe a research initiative which is/has:
Used to answer complex or challenging research questions;
An empirical approach to answering the research question;
Involving many variables not all of which may be obvious;
Qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods and can be used in either the positivist or interpretivist mode;
Presented as a narrative as a way of facilitating the answering of the question;
A clear-cut focus on a unit of analysis;
Recognised the context in which the research question is put and the answer is sought;
Not extended for a long period of time i.e. does not compete with historiography;
Enriched by multiple sources of data or evidence in order to offer a degree of triangulation.

have a proclivity for multiple methods

positivist type assumptions

a case study may be defined as an empirical enquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real life context, when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident, and in which multiple sources of evidence are used.
There are five issues addressed in this definition and these are:
empirical enquiry;
contemporary phenomenon;
real life context;
boundaries are not clearly evident;
multiple sources of evidence.