On the last weeks theme ”Qualitative and case study research” at the seminarium we got divided up into groups. My group discussed a lot how to define a case study and also what can be called a case study. One way we defined a case study was to say that a case study is adapted to find the problem. It is often that you in a company or anywhere know that something is wrong but don’t really know the source of the problem. Thanks to a case study where you look at a lot of data and compare it you can find the unknown problem and then solve it.
This got us to start discussing however other texts we had read or written maybe where case studies and not qualitative methods that we once thought.
One other way to defining it was that you thru the case study find the problem and the with qualitative methods can you understand the problems. When we started to talk about this we realized that a lot of the decisions that you make in life are based on a very small case study.
I like your comparison to real life and that we make small case studies all the time! That is a very good way of seeing it and of explaining what a case study actually is. It can sometimes be difficult to understand the difference between only using qualitative methods and doing a case study, as you mentioned, since the methodology of a case is often qualitative. One thing I would like to comment on, though, is that there can be a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in a case study. Your example with the company having a problem is a great one! In that situation a questionnaire could be very useful together with observing the structure of the company in order to find a solution.
SvaraRadera