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Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Vol. 29, No.

3, 421427, November 2005

Case Study Research


GLYNIS COUSIN
Higher Education Academy, York, UK

ABSTRACT Case study research aims to explore and depict a setting with a view to advancing understanding. This note explores the dimensions of case study research in higher education, with special reference to geographical eldwork. It explores Stakes three categories of case study research: intrinsic, instrumental and collective. It provides guidelines concerning the limits and denitions of case study research, the provision of thick descriptions, the formulation of good research questions, data collection, analysis and the search for meaning in case study research ndings. Case study research has the capacity to sophisticate the beholding of the settings and activities that are scrutinized. KEY WORDS : Educational research, pedagogy, qualitative methods, thick description

Introduction Higher education development is full of case study reports but few of these are research based. Many are simply narratives of practice, written often as a result of educational development initiatives. The authors of such reports may have missed an opportunity to combine their educational development work with that of educational research. With this in mind, the following guide aims to introduce some of the methods and purposes of case study research in order to encourage interest in shifting case studies of educational development towards research-based ones. This paper forms part of a continuing series of short introductory papers that focus on current practices, methodologies and techniques in educational research (cf. Cousin & Healey, 2003; Gaskin, 2003; Hopwood, 2004; Madge & OConnor, 2004). Purposes and Scope of Case Study Research There is no settled view concerning the parameters of case study research (Yin, 2003) but, broadly speaking, case study research aims to explore and depict a setting with a view to

Correspondence Address: Glynis Cousin,The Higher Education Academy, Innovation Way, York Science Park, Heslington York, YO10 5BR, UK. Email: Glynis.Cousin@heacademy.ac.uk ISSN 0309-8265 Print/1466-1845 Online/05/030421-7 q 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/03098260500290967

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advancing understanding of it. In presenting ideas and techniques for case study research, this note will use the example of eldwork in geography education although the method can apply equally to the exploration of a department, a programme of study, a module or indeed an individual student (cf. Cousin & Jenkins, 2001). Stakes (1995) three categories of case study research address its scope well: (1) Intrinsic Case Study In intrinsic case study research, the researchers interest is simply in understanding the case in hand, e.g. what is happening on this geography eld trip, at this time and place and in these circumstances? This kind of case study research is often t for the purpose of evaluation research because it can be about assigning worth to a particular set of activities and experiences. Intrinsic case study is also often appropriate for the study of a particular person as a case, e.g. what is the geography eldwork experience of Mary, as a disabled student (cf. Hall et al., 2002, 2004)? Another unit of analysis might be an academic department. Although a form of generalization might come from a focus on the singularity of a case (these are some of the issues that may attend disability and eldwork or geography departments), the research aims to generalize within rather than from the case. For further discussion of this issue see Hamilton et al., (1977) and Simons (1980). (2) Instrumental Case Study In instrumental case study research, the researcher explores a case as an instance (a specic geography eld trip) of a class (geography eld trips) in order to shed light on an issue concerning the class, e.g. what is happening on this geography eld trip that can tell us something about geography eld trips in general (cf. Fuller et al., 2003)? In investigating this kind of question, the researcher will need to be sensitive to what local effects might inhibit full condence in the making of generalizations. Whereas an intrinsic case study aims to generalize within, instrumental case study attempts to generalize from a case study. Collective case studies extend this attempt. (3) Collective Case Study In collective case study research, researchers select more than one case of the class to achieve some kind of representation, e.g. what is happening on these eld trips that can tell us something about eld trips in general? This broad question may be rened into a pedagogic hypothesis to be tested across the sites, e.g. learning on eld trips enables geography students to begin to think like geographers. It is important to note that although they may strive for representative research sites, case study researchers are not interested in a strict process of sampling; this is because cases also have to be selected for their amenability to research access and this does not always produce a representative sample. Case study research aims for depth and if a site cannot deliver this owing to limited access to actors, events and settings, it will not yield a sufciently thick description of a case (see below). In choosing which kind of case study to conduct from the three models above, bear in mind that researchers of a single instrumental case study (or an intrinsic one) can publish their case with an invitation to readers to replicate their study so that ndings and assertions can be compared.

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In medicine, the case is often a patient; in business studies, a workplace; and in education research it can be a programme, a single institution (school, university), a module or a particular educational innovation. It is important that the research focus is within a naturalistic setting to prompt understandings of whatever is under scrutiny in its own habitat. Naturalistic settings are simply those where the research designer has not contrived all of the activities to be investigated, as in, for instance, the example of experimental design. It is worth pointing out that case study research should not be confused with action research though there are some points of convergence. Action research involves the study of a particular change intervention through a number of reective stages; action research also strives to treat participants in the research site as co-researchers (for a brief guide to action research, see Cousin, 2002). In contrast, case study research tends to be researchercentred, often involving observation on participants; most importantly, it attempts to provide a holistic portrayal and understanding of the research setting. Though in the course of the study researchers are likely to rene their focus, in the rst instance the focus is the case, meant as broadly as possible. For this reason, researchers need to establish the temporal and spatial parameters of their study. The case study boundary concerns its physical connes, its activities and the time span of the study. For instance, if you want to research a particular group of students on a geography eld trip, you may want to include evening social activities, the coach trips to and from the eld trip site and perhaps classroom-based preparation/debrieng sessions. Or you may want to identify a set number of days of a eld trip as the basis of your study. As indicated, as you research your case you might well redraw the boundaries in the light of emerging evidence but an initial working denition will serve as a compass. Much case study research comes from the ethnographic tradition of cultural anthropology where the research site (be it a community, a classroom, family, etc.) is regarded as the eld and the researcher sets up camp there to gather and analyse his/her data over a period of time, often as a participant observer (for canonical texts see for instance, Willis, 1977; Goffman, 1991; Foote-Whyte, 1993). In the case of the learning and teaching of geography in higher education, the eld is more likely to include a teachers own course, department or institution and the study of this case will lend itself to participant observation. Such observation requires systematic methods of recording through the writing up of eld notes. Delamont (1992) contains a full discussion on approaches to and purposes of eld-note writing. Incidentally, in gathering observational data, ethical questions would need to be settled regarding the informed consent of the observed to be observed.

Research Questions for Case Studies Although case study researchers enter the eld with an open, exploratory frame of mind, they need some kind of compass to guide them. Stake (1995) offers an alternative to a hypothesis-led inquiry in the form of issue questions. Novice researchers, he argues, tend to formulate descriptive, information-yielding questions like: How is the lecturer facilitating learning on the eld trip? In contrast, Stake urges researchers to use time at the design stage to formulate load-bearing issue questions, such as: What teaching, learning

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and research strategies are made possible by eld trips? This question produces what Stakes calls good thinking because it prompts more than a descriptive account of a phenomenon. In my view, there is a tension to be managed here because, on the one hand, the case study research requires some degree of nosing around the eld to see what emerges and, on the other hand, some steer from research questions for the capture of meaningful data. The idea of formulating load-bearing issue questions for collective case study seems to me to be a particularly good one because it could support forms of comparison. Towards a Thick Description Case study research is a broad church and can be conducted through a range of research methods, both quantitative and qualitative. The study of an educational setting might also include attention to naturally rising data such as student attainment and attendance records. Choosing the method of data collection is clearly going to be linked to what seems appropriate both in the setting and in relation to the understandings the researcher hopes to generate. The most important aim of the research, whatever the method(s) used, is to strive for what Clifford Geerz (1983) calls thick description. To achieve this, the researcher might use narrative devices like cameos and vignettes alongside more formal analysis in an attempt to capture multiple realities and meanings within the setting. For instance, the researcher may want to count the amount of times a teacher speaks to students and watch for variation in feedback behaviour; sometimes it is useful to construct an inventory for this element of the research. If this is to contribute to a thick description, the researcher will need to watch for whatever else maybe happening in the classroom. The researcher may want to offer impressions of the kind of teacher being observed. Does he/she seem relaxed? Or stern? The researcher may note the details of a critical incident that might concern how the students reacted, perhaps when the re alarm was unexpectedly sounded: how many students returned to the room? How did the teacher settle them again? The researcher will need to describe the environment: how is the room arranged (cf. Moos, 1979)? What is the age of the furniture? What have the students etched onto the desks? What notices are on the wall? The researcher may look out for what seems to prompt the anxieties of students and teacher and so forth. There is a need to be equally alert to what may seem, initially, trivial phenomena as well as those of clear and immediate signicance to the studys focus. The idea is to write up a case study capable of giving readers the vicarious experience of being there so that they can share in the interpretation of the case, adjudicating its worth alongside the researcher (Adelman et al., 1980; Stake, 1995). For those more used to experimental design research, it might be helpful to think of case study research data collection and analysis as a bit like good detection work (or at least idealized ctions of good detective work). The researchers should consider the ways in which a detective meticulously builds up a picture of the case, using whatever evidence is to hand, treating data from exhaustive house-to-house searches with the same weight as a possibly telling cigar butt left in the ashtray. The detective noses around the crime scene, familiarizing him/herself with its character, developing a prole of the suspects, reecting on the available evidence and any puzzles or gaps it presents. Finally, the sleuth comes to a view about his/her prime suspect. Case study research has some afnities with this

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process. However, the analogy breaks down at the reporting stage where the detective must write up ndings in as starkly realist a style as possible. Ethnographic researchers regard the observational, the interpretive and the writing-up processes as activities that straddle social science and the humanities, producing what Geerz (1983) has called a blurred genre. Stakes book, The Art of Case Study Research (and it is no accident that he writes of the art of case study research) presents extracts from this genre which offer strong examples of this. Some academics, particularly from a hard science tradition, have difculty seeing this kind of approach as scientically credible. There are at least two good responses to such problems. First, within modern Western thought, making sense of the world is thought to require a detachment from it and this is often symbolized in the dry reporting language we use as researchers. This language creates an air of researcher neutrality (scientism) and, while there is no space to elaborate, the possibility of neutrality in any academic discipline is increasingly understood as impossible (see, for instance, Nowotny et al., (2001) for a discussion on re-thinking science). Second, while case study researchers in the interpretivist tradition value impressionistic data they have their own conception of methodological rigour, which is achieved through the fusion of artist and scientist (Bassey, 1999); this fusion includes an appreciation of the connections between the quantitative and the qualitative.

Case Study Research Data Collection and Analysis In case study research, data collection and data analysis tend to proceed at the same time; analysis writes Stake (1995, p. 71), is a matter of giving meaning to rst impressions as well as to nal compilations. Often it is the rst impressions that also alert the researcher to the need to attend to the quantitative; for instance, observing that a teacher gives encouraging feedback to a nervous student may signal the worth of counting the times this happens for other students; or counting the level and depth of feedback generally. In so observing, the researcher might begin to suspect, for example, that international students are getting more feedback than other students; by the end of the study, it might emerge that the feedback is longer rather than more helpful for this group. Only attention to the repetition of phenomena will surface this nding. There is a common belief that qualitative and quantitative research are opposites but both are concerned with numbers and patterns. Stake (1995, p. 76) expressed his own approach in this respect very well when he said the quantitative side of me looked for the emergence of meaning from the repetition of phenomena, the qualitative side of me looked for the emergence of meaning in the single instance. In terms of the emergence of meaning from qualitative data, the interpretivist researcher often adopts something akin to a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). This requires that, in the rst instance, researchers try to see what the data are telling them rather than asking those data to yield responses required by the issues or hypothesis that guided their collection. Once the data have been organized by themes (which may include themes about what is absent in the data), the researcher can see whether they throw light on the questions/issues being addressed. The idea is for the researcher to try and bracket his/her focus to avoid seeing only what he/she wants to see in favour of attaining a more reexive distance from the data.

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Case Study Research, Predictability and Truth Claims Whereas experimental design is concerned with causation and explanation (if we do A, then B will follow), case study research is concerned with description, exploration and understanding. In Basseys (1999) view, the most appropriate aim for case study research is to aspire to the making of fuzzy generalizations: this notion is based on the scientic conception of the fuzzy principle, which asserts that everything is a matter of degree, nothing is certain. In other words, we should aspire to predict probability in terms of may rather than will, e.g. our case studies show that if students do not undertake eldwork, they may have difculties in learning to think like geographers. How is such an assertion held to be reliable? Although case study research is squarely within an interpretivist tradition in which the subjective bias of the researcher is accepted as a given, there are six key strategies for keeping narrative fraud (e.g. overstating from imsy evidence, ignoring local effects, opportunistically cherry picking the data) at a minimum: Researchers can adopt what Bassey calls an ethic of caution with regard to their generalizations. Researchers need to be reective about their own position and possible bias. Where they are making a clearly contestable assertion, researchers can strengthen their evidence through triangulation (i.e. providing diverse evidence sources). Researchers can ensure that their account provides a sufciently thick description of the case such that the reader can share in the interpretation with the researchers. Researchers can share their provisional analysis with stakeholders (students, respondents, etc.) for their comments (to acknowledge, for instance, rival explanations). Researchers can take a postmodern stanceso claiming that all research reports are the stories of the researcher. These stories are as much constituted by the language the researchers speak as by the empirical evidence they record and interpret (Stronach & McLure, 1997). The purpose of research, according to this stance, is to author a case study in order to advance debate and to enrich understanding, much like a work of literature. Thus, Stake has a convergent view about the purpose of research: The function of research is not necessarily to map and conquer the world but to sophisticate the beholding of it. (Stake, 1995, p. 43) This conception of research activity as something that can sophisticate the beholding of whatever setting and activities are under scrutiny seems to me to sum up the ambitions of case study research very well.

References
Adelman, C., Jenkins, D. & Kemmis, S. (1980) Rethinking case study: notes from the second Cambridge conference, in: H. Simons (Ed.) Towards a Science of the Singular, pp. 4561 (Norwich: CARE, University of East Anglia). Bassey, M. (1999) Case Study Research in Educational Settings (Milton Keynes: Open University Press).

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Cousin, G. (2002) Strengthening action research for educational development, Educational Developments, 1(3), pp. 57. Cousin, G. & Healey, M. (2003) Pedagogic research methods in geography and higher education, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 27(3), p. 341. Cousin, G. & Jenkins, D. (2001) On the case: an introduction to case study research, Coventry University, Centre for Higher Education Development, Available at: http://home.ched.coventry.ac.uk/ched/research/onthecase. htm (accessed April 2005). Delamont, S. (1992) Fieldwork in Educational SettingsMethods, Pitfalls and Perspectives (London: Falmer Press). Foote-Whyte, W. (1993) Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press). Fuller, I., Gaskin, S. & Scott, I. (2003) Student perceptions of geography and environmental science eldwork in the light of restricted access to the eld caused by foot and mouth disease in the UK in 2001, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 27(1), pp. 79 102. Gaskin, S. (2003) A guide to nominal group technique in focus-group research, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 27(3), pp. 342 347. Geerz, C. (1983) Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books). Glaser, B. G. & Strauss, A. L. (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (Chicago, IL: Aldine). Goffman, E (1991) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situations of Mental Health Patients (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books). Hall, T., Healey, M. & Harrison, M. (2002) Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses on exclusion and inclusion, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS27, pp. 213231. Hall, T., Healey, M. & Harrison, M. (2004) Reections on Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses on exclusion and inclusion, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 28(2), pp. 251 253. Hamilton, D., Jenkins, D., King, C., Macdonald, B. & Parlett, M. (1977) Beyond the Numbers Game: A Reader in Educational Evaluation (London: Macmillan). Hopwood, N. (2004) Research design and methods of data collection and analysis: research students conceptions of multiple method case study, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 28(2), pp. 347352. Madge, C. & OConnor, H. (2004) On-line methods in geographical educational research, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 28(1), pp. 143 152. Moos, R. H. (Ed.) (1979) Evaluating Educational Environments (San Francisco: Jossey Bass). Nowotny, H., Scott, P. & Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Polity Press). Simons, H. (1980) Towards a Science of the Singular (Norwich: CARE, University of East Anglia). Stake, R. E. (1995) The Art of Case Study Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage). Stronach, I. & MacLure, M (1997) Educational Research Undone: The Postmodern Embrace (Buckingham: Open University Press). Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour (London: Saxon House). Yin, R. K. (2003) Case Study Research, Design and Methods, 3rd edn (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).

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