ABSTRACT
One important approach used in education and educational research is the case study. A case study is a detailed examination of one person or one setting or one single set of documents or one particular event. Case study focuses on one ‘unit’. The unit may be a school (or even a classroom within it); it could even be one student in a school or college; it could be one course; in a study of employers’ needs, each ‘employing organisation’ could make up a single case. This is at once the strength, and, as some may argue, the weakness of case study, i.e. the importance of the context of the unit, and the consequent problem of generalisation.
