Case Studies
Thomas W. Lauer
A case is defined as “a phenomenon occurring in a bounded context.”
(Huberman and Miles 1994). Therefore, while a case study may be thought of
as a methodology, a case is not. It is an object to be studied (Clandinin and
Connelly 1994). A case study is an in-depth study of the case or of a group of
cases, the bounded system. The case is bounded by specifying time and place.
It centers around a phenomenon such as a program, event, or activity, or it may
center around an individual or group(s) of individuals. The case study should
utilize multiple sources of information including interviews, observations,
documents, reports, and archival material. In describing the case, it should be
put in context. This could include descriptions of the physical, organizational,
social, political, or economic settings.
A case study may focus on a single case or multiple cases. In general, the
process for conducting a multiple case study resembles the process for a single
case study. See figure 1. It begins with the researcher’s collection of field notes
through the accumulation of documents, interview notes, written observations,
etc. This corpus of unanalyzed text can be called field text. A discussion of how
documents are selected, informants are selected, observations are made, etc. is
necessary for understanding the production of the field text. Next, the
researcher examines the field text to discern patterns, ascertain what is salient to
