Reflections on theme 6: Qualitative and Case Studies Research

We discussed case studies very thoroughly during the seminar. To me I understand ‘case studies’ as a combination of several methods, however ‘case studies’ can also be characterized as being naturally defined and limited as well as inductive (no hypotheses or such things). The main reason to use case studies is to (try to) explain/analyse a real and complex phenomena. We talked about the psychiatric disorder ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and if we always have been able to conduct case studies in that study field. The somewhat biased answer is that it wasn’t possible to do case studies in the field when the construct ‘ADHD’ didn’t exist. This connects back to the earlier themes of the course when we discussed the importance of label and name things.

I wrote that it is a biased answer since I think this area of label things in this course is a bit difficult. In this aspect I agree on that we need definitions and names for stuff in order to communicate smoothly and perhaps also for conducting case studies. However, when it comes to case studies I have learnt that there are two types of it. Either the case can be well-known and thus pre-defined (like ADHD nowadays) or the case can be defined by the scientist herself/himself. Therefore I think it’s arguable to define whether or not a researcher is using case studies.

We talked about an article under the topic of Youtube users. This paper can be argued both to be a research based on several methods or it can be argued to be based on a case study. My point is that we should try to practise nominalism and group things together but we also need to look at every case as a unique one. If we feel that we need to define whether or not a research is a case study.

Moving on… :) We didn’t talk as much as I had wanted to about Eisenhardt and her table. However, my brain was a bit tired after the discussion on case studies. My conclusion is that the table is useful to analyze papers and articles and that it is a bit subjective how you choose to analyze it. In general this theme has taught me that common sense works well in this area. Additionally, it was nice to see correlation with previous themes of the course. Either I’m starting to become a weird philosopher or I’m a bit snowed under thinking about philosophy stuff. I will save this for my final reflection, but spoiler alert, I am surprised how interesting I think this is. I mean I don’t get everything but the things we’re reading about at the moment are pretty much as far away from math and physics as it can be. However the philosophical point of view is that is on the contrary. Math, physics and philosophy are strongly linked together. What I mean is though that we usually calculate and estimate stuff and in this course we’ve been pretty much discussing and thinking of abstract things.

Anyway, the sixth theme was, like the fifth theme, easy to connect to the upcoming essay we are to write. Case studies and qualitative methods are essential and very hands-on knowledge to have. A good article is one where the researcher have used several methods to look at the problem from different angles. Even if you have the same problem it can be solved differently both in terms of how you define the problem (as Haibo Li talked about during his lecture) but also depending on which methods you choose to use.