Theme 6 - Afterthoughts

Even though we had no lecture this week the seminar was very helpful. In smaller groups we discussed the studies we picked. During our discussion we discovered that we were no longer completely sure about our previous definition of case studies we had written about. We wondered about the exact difference between case studies and experiments and it was not until Ilias joined our group discussion that we found out about it. It was the lack of a certain hypothesis that is significant for case studies. An experiment shows a specific research goal, a statement that should get verified or falsified by the study results. Whereas a case study is only conducted when the research area is not well explored yet. When a researcher does not even know which question to ask about the field, then a case study is performed to find out about the interesting questions that could be asked. Moreover, the question whether a case study is a research method came up in our discussion. In my opinion it is not - even though I wrote something different in my first blog post. I changed my mind because it cannot be put on the same level as quantitative and qualitative methods. The reason for this is that this would mean that a case study is independent of these other two methods. This is not the case since a case study can make use of qualitative and/ or quantitative methods. Therefore it is better to call it a research strategy instead. In general I would adjust my previous definition of case studies as follows: a case study is a research strategy that uses qualitative and/ or quantitative methods in order to gain new knowledge about an unknown or sparsely discovered context.
At the end of the seminar Ilias made a good example for a case study I have not thought about earlier. I only imagined case studies to be similar to the ones we all picked for this week’s seem: a research which investigates various cases in a certain field, compares the results and compiles them to new knowledge. In contrast to this Ilias mentioned a man who happens to only have a short time memory because of an unlucky accident. This rarely ever happens and therefore case studies should be conducted with this person to find out more about this specific phenomena. Similar cases are often found in psychology researches. Another specific example for case studies would be ethnical studies were researcher join another ethnical group to find out more about their way of living.
Furthermore, we spent some time discussing qualitative research. In the studies we had chosen the most commonly used qualitative method was an interview but other methods we talked about were content analysis and observation. We came to the conclusion that some of the interviews were unstructured and lacked a certain hypothesis. But this was also due to fact that some of this studies were case studies as well.
Overall this seminar gave me a different and most of all a better understanding of what case studies are and what they are used for. Before I was not even aware that it was not able to distinguish case studies from other research strategies.