ABSTRACT
Case study methodology is widely used across multiple disciplines and fields. But what is a case, and what is a case study? Think of your own understanding of a case study. How might you define it? In his introduction to the fascinating edited volume called What Is a Case?, Charles Ragin argued that scholars use the word case “with relatively little consideration of the theories and metatheories embedded in these terms or in the methods that use cases” (1992, p. 1). Case is often defined as place. Researchers may use ‘case’ to mean one setting, place, or institution, or they may use ‘case’ for both the institution (or place or setting) and each person in it. We may also use case interchangeably with ‘units of analysis,’ but this can be problematic because it does not sufficiently separate the categories we use to organize our data and the categories we construct based on our theoretical framework. We may assume, said Ragin, that cases are both “similar enough and separate enough to permit treating them as comparable instances of the same general phenomenon” (p. 1). In his essay, Ragin posed a series of provocative questions: What is the relationship between a case and a variable? Are there times when these mean the same thing? What is the difference between case-driven studies and variabledriven case studies? Is a case study constituted by empirical units (e.g., a state, or a hospital) or theoretical constructs? Finally, are cases discovered or developed over the course of conducting research, or are they “general and relatively external to conduct of research” (p. 8)? The answer to each of these questions has implications for how a researcher thinks about and uses case studies.
