Case study

1. CASE STUDY
BY
Dr.J.ROBINSON RAJA
MVSC SCHOLAR
IVRI,BAREILLY

2. CASE STUDY METHOD
• Qualitative.
• Careful and complete observation of a social unit.
• Study in depth
• Full analysis of limited number of events
• Exhaustive study of a person
• Social microscope – Burgess

3. REASONS FOR CASE STUDY
• Focus is to study How and Why
• Specific purposes.
• Boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly
evident
• Multiple source evidence are used

4. OBJECTIVES
• Clinical purpose
• Diagnostic purpose
• Fact findings about educational or psychological problems
• Supplementing other information.

5. CHARACTERISTICS
• Intensive
• Qualitative
• Causal factors
• Behaviour pattern is studied directly.
• Results in fruitful hypothesis.

6. EVOLUTION AND SCOPE
• Widely used systematic field research technique
• Frederic Le Play –Study of family budgets
• Herbert spencer – study of different cultures
• William healy – Juvenile delinquency- better than statistics
• Used by anthropologists, historian, novelists, dramatists,
management experts

7. PHASES OF CASE STUDY
• Retrospective
• Prospective
• Conspective

8. CRITERIA OF A GOOD CASE STUDY
• Continuity
• Completeness
• Validity
• Confidential recording
• Scientific synthesis

9. SOURCES OF CASE DATA
• Personal documents
• Life histories
• Related persons
• Official records
• Subject himself

10. CASE STUDY DESIGN
• YIN- 5 COMPONENTS
• Research questions
• Propositions
• Unit of analysis
• Detemination of how the data are linked to propositions
• Criteria to interpret the findings

11. ASSUMPTIONS
• Uniformity in the basic human nature inspite of the fact that human
behaviour may vary accounting to the situation
• Natural history of the unit
• Comprehensive study

12. STEPS IN CONDUCTING A CASE STUDY
• Status of situation or unit of attention
• Collection of data, examination and history
• Diagnosis and identification of casual factors
• Adjustment, treatment and therapy
• Followup programme

13. TYPES OF CASE STUDY
• Group or community case study
• Casual comparative study
• Activity analysis
• Content or document analysis
• A follow-up study
• Trend studies

14. ADVANTAGES
• Deepens our perception, gets at behaviour directly
• Reveal strivings, tensions and motivations
• Natural history of social unit and relationship
• Study of social change
• Construction of interview schedule and questionnaire and
formulation of hypothesis
• Intensive

15. ADVANTAGES
• Nature of units to be studied along with nature of universe.(Mode of
organising data).
• Real record of personal experiences
• Enhances the experience of researchers.
• Indispensable for therapeutic and administrative purposes
• Rare disorders and one time events
• Complements and informs theory, research and practice.

16. LIMITATIONS
• Seldom comparable
• No generalisation
• Real information is not collected
• More time and expenditure
• Personal bias, ability and judgement of researcher
• Several assumptions
• Answers what but not why

17. CASE STUDY VS STATISTICAL METHOD
CASE STUDY
• Qualitative
• Fewer cases- intensive
• No sampling selection
• Generalization by common
sense, less reliable
STATISTICAL METHOD
• Quantitative
• Large no of samples
• Selection based on sampling
• Mathematical treatment, more
reliable.

18. THANK YOU

19. REFERENCES
• Research methodology – methods and techniques (2nd revised
edition) by C.R. Kothari.
• Essentials of research design and methodology by Geoffrey Marczyk,
David DeMatteo, and David Festinger.
• Research methodology by Ranjit kumar
• Fundamentals of research methodology and statistics by Yogesh
kumar singh.