Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
● Define a case study as a qualitative research method
● Understand the process of case selection
What is a case study?
In the words of political scientist John Gerring, a case study is “an intensive study of a single unit for the purpose of understanding a larger class of (similar) units.”25 A case study is above all else an in-depth description and exploration of an event, person, group, and/or place. In addition to deep analytical description, case studies may be critical and present evidence to build counter- narratives to the dominant narrative of an event. The “intensive study” of a case study may stem from utilizing all of the methods described above, from interviewing subjects to engaging in ethnographic fieldwork, in order to build a comprehensive understanding of the case. Quantitative data may also be marshaled to deepen the case study. The goal of crafting a case study is to draw inferences from that case to test theory.
The first issue the researcher must address is case selection. First, given the definition above, a case study should be relevant to the theory or hypothesis that a researcher wishes to test. For example, if a researcher wanted to investigate how mineral wealth might contribute to poor governance outcomes in a country, it would not make much sense to select a country without mineral wealth. (To be concrete, the Democratic Republic of Congo might be a good country case to explore, but Haiti less so. However, to make the inferences from that case study more valid, a researcher might want to consider crafting a second case study on a country similar to the DRC, but without sources of mineral wealth, to explore whether governance outcomes differ across the two cases.)
Second, the selected case should be representative of a larger group. This is to head off criticism that the chosen case is too much of an outlier to provide leverage on understanding the general phenomena of interest. To take up the previous example, if a researcher wishes to study the DRC as a case of the so-called “resource curse,” in what ways is the DRC like other mineral-rich countries? In which ways does it differ? And are those differences so significant that the DRC is not representative of the “class” of mineral-rich countries that the researcher would be exploring with this case study? Of course, every place and person is sui generis, but an important consideration is whether there are such enormous differences that a case is an outlier rather than representative.
Third, case selection hinges on practical considerations. Is this a case for which there exists a robust body of secondary literature to build a baseline of preliminary knowledge? Does understanding the case require language skills? Does the researcher know which organizations or individuals to contact to collect information? Do they have access to those organizations and individuals? Will building the case study require conducting fieldwork? If so, for how long, and how much might this require in research funds?
Case studies are a powerful tool in the qualitative methods toolbox. They are a means to investigate the causal processes which are often lost in traditional quantitative approaches such as regression analysis. They are also empirical and hence testing theory against what is transpiring in the “real” world. They demand a researcher to think creatively and holistically about a subject, then dive fully into learning as much about it as possible.
