The Role of Theory in Design Work-
For case studies, theory development as part of the design phase is essential, whether the ensuing case study’s purpose is to develop or to test theory.
The simple goal is to have a sufficient blueprint for your study and this requires theoretical popositions, usefully noted by Sutton and Staw (1995) as “a (hypothetical) story about why acts, events, structure, and thoughts occur” (p. 378). Then the complete research design will provide surprisingly strong guidance in determining what data to collect and the strategies for analyzing study data is an essential step in doing case studies.
Asking yourself challenging questions about what you are studying, why you are proposing to do the study, and what you hope to learn as a result of the study.
Generalizing from case study to theory-Theory development does not only facilitate the data collection phase of the ensuing case study. The appropriately developed theory also is the level at which the generalization of the case study will occur.
A fatal flaw in doing case studies is to conceive of statistical generalization as the method of generalizing the results of your case study.
Analytic generalization, in which a previously developed theory is used as a template with which to compare the empirical results of the case study.
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