If I'm going to be frank, I don't really know what to say about theme 6. Without the lecture, any mutual synergy there might've been between the lecturer's point of view and that of myself and my fellow students has disappeared, leading us to instead discuss our various interpretations of the texts read. While this led to some rather interesting discussions, specifically about the exact definition of a case study, I do feel very strongly that the theme would've been much more powerful if the lecturer hadn't forgotten to show up.
In any case, the exact definition of a case study seemed more complicated to define than it might've appeared on first hand, especially seeing as none of it had used it very exstinsively in our prior researches. One of the main defining qualities, to us, was the fact that it was something that occured or existed independent of the research for which it was a case study - i.e. it wasn't an experiment or controlled environment designed to answer a research question.
More complicated was exactly how to define the relationship between the case at hand and the research. My initial thoughts were that researchers were looking for a specific type of outcome, and used a case to measure that outcome and/or see in what way it developed. If you're researching the productivity of older personnel at a company, for example, you might go to Company X and compare older and younger employees' productivity. From these observations, you might try to see how it can be generalized or applied to other situations. The company (or more specifically its staff) would then be the case study, whereas the productivity of staff by age would be the topic of research.
However, another option that was mentioned was a case in which the type of outcome was unknown, which is to say that the researchers didn't know beforehand what type of results they were looking for. This was somewhat of a contra-intuitive concept to me, because researchers would then have to completely rely on either reasoning or instinct to decide that a certain case might prove interesting or useful for research. I am still not sure how common this kind of research is, but it's certainly an option I hadn't considered before.
2 comments:
I sort of understand how you feel about not having a lecture for the theme. And I also agree that having a lecture would surely have contributed to the the theme and our perspective. I totally agree that defining what a case study was, was quite complicated. I also had problem finding a case study let alone providing a definition for it. To be frank, I am still not sure what a case study actually is and how to conduct one. I am glad that you brought up the most important issues in the theme and shortcomings thereof. Nice reflection.
I agree that it was difficult to discuss this theme. Mainly, we could discuss what we had learned more precisely about what qualitative research and case studies are. But that isn't nothing, as you also discovered. The potential of case studies indeed became more apparent since we learned that they are often used to study cases with unknown outcomes. Using that approach and combining different contradicting case studies can thereby be used to produce new theories. It would have been great to be shown an example of a paper doing this as I also have no idea of how common it is or where to find one.
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