Gary Thomas - How to Do Your Case Study

2nd Edition

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Gary Thomas 2016

This edition published 2016

First edition published 2011

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At its best, the case study provides the most vivid, the most inspirational analysis that an inquiry can offer. Einstein did it; Newton did it. Sociologists do it; psychologists do it. Doctors do it; teachers do it; lawyers do it; nurses do it. It is done across the disciplinary and methodological spectrum, and even though this book is, first and foremost, for those in the applied social sciences and humanities, I hope it will also be useful to students and researchers in other fields. Ive been delighted with the reception of the first edition, which seems to be used by researchers in a variety of disciplines. The new edition contains much more material on ethics and data collection, and has new sections on analysis, including material on grounded theory, sociometry and NVivo.

The case study provides a form of inquiry that elevates a view of life in its complexity. The contrasting view, of course, is that an inquiry is best conducted by breaking life up into digestible, study-sized chunks. We all like easily digestible food, but its not often the most nutritious.

Its the realisation that complexity in social affairs is frequently indivisible which has led to the case study having the status of one of the most popular and most fertile design frames for researchers work. Its a design frame with huge potential, but it also has its restrictions. Sometimes I feel that students stumble into a case study without really being sure of its benefits or its limits. So, in this book, I look at not just how to do a case study but also at what case studies are good for and what they are not good for.

The case study has branched out and blossomed from its origins, which were, according to White (1992), in the professional training of lawyers at the Harvard Law School in the nineteenth century. It was the appropriately named Christopher Columbus Langdell, the first dean of that law school, who set the ball rolling in 1870. Actually, Ive taken Whites word for it that it was Christopher Columbus Langdell who named the case study method, but, of course, the method is so obvious it is difficult to make an argument for it needing to be pioneered or invented at all. Rather in the way that America was bound to have been discovered with or without the voyage of the first, and rather more famous, Christopher Columbus, the case study method would have been stumbled on even without the insights of his nineteenth-century namesake.

Others could quite legitimately claim to have been the first to develop a systematic method for looking at single cases, even if they didnt think to call their method the case method or case study. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and his study of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, at the beginning of the nineteenth century could equally take the accolade, as could Frdric Le Play in his celebrated studies of French working people in the middle of that same century. (Le Play used a case method wherein he would invite himself to reside with ordinary families for extended periods until he got to know them intimately. Whether or not his uninvited sojourns in the cottages of poor coalminers of the Jura were exuberantly welcomed by his hosts is unrecorded one can imagine some Pythonesque tableaux but his rich analyses were lauded in both political and literary circles.)

All of this pioneering work originated in the social sciences and the humanities, but one of the points I try to make throughout the book is that researchers use case studies far less self-consciously and less apologetically in fields separate from these. In these other fields, inquirers seem to be more inclined to do what comes naturally to adopt methods that are right for the questions in hand without undue hand-wringing about the correctness of this or that method. Given that there has indeed been hand-wringing and uncertainty about how best to use case studies, particularly in the applied social sciences, I hope this book will offer some clear advice to students on how best to do such an inquiry, with lots of examples of how it can be used most fruitfully.