Chapter 1
The case study as a research method-first and foremost, you should explain and show how you are devoting yourself to following a rigorous methodological path. The path begins with a thorough literature review and the careful and thoughtful posing of research questions or objectives. Equally important will be a dedication to formal and explicit procedures when doing your research.
Second, you should understand and openly acknowledge the strengths and limitations of case study research.
WHY USE CASE STUDY: As a research method, the case study is used in many situations, to contribute to our knowledge of individual, group, organizational, social, political, and related phenomena. The distinctive need for case studies arises out of the desire to understand complex social phenomena. In brief, the case study method allows investigators to retain the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life events.
When to use case study: The conditions: (a) the type of research question posed, (b) the extent of control an investigator has over actual behavioral events, and (c) the degree of focus on contemporary as opposed to historical events.
“How” and “why” questions are explanatory and likely lead to the use of case studies, histories, and experiments as the preferred research methods. This is because such questions deal with operational links needing to be traced over time, rather than mere frequencies or incidence.
I anticipate my research questions will be:
1. Within the Student Affairs (Student Life) division what are the organizational features (structure, processes, people/relationships, learning, rewards, political, and culture/values) that seem to facilitate the process of internal collaboration related to learning oriented initiatives in Christian higher education institutions?
2. What organizational features are most important: structure, processes, people/relationships, learning, rewards, political, and/or culture/values?
Case studies, like experiments, are generalizable to theoretical propositions and not to populations or universes.
A case study is an empirical inquiry that
o Investigates a contemporary phenomenon in depth and with its real-life context, especially when
o The boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident
In other words, you would use the case study method because you wanted to understand a real-life phenomenon in depth, (like collaboration) but such understanding encompassed important contextual conditions—because they were highly pertinent to your phenomenon of study.
The case study inquiry
o Copes with the technically distinctive situation in which there will be many more variables of interest than data points, and as one results
o Relies on multiple sources of evidence, with data needing to converge in a
triangulating fashion, and as another result
o Benefits from the prior development of theoretical propositions to guide data collection and analysis
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