Case Study Design Essay

There are different types of qualitative research design; namely - a case study, action research, ethnography, phenomenology, narrative inquiry and grounded theory (Saunders et al., 2012). The philosophical position of this study of interpretivism supports the case study approach used to investigate the phenomenon under study. A case study design is particularly useful in empirical enquiry investigating in-depth contemporary phenomena, and drawing data from multiple sources for triangulation (Yin, 2014, p. 16 and 17). Yin (2014) emphasises the importance of context in a case study in research design, adding that the advantage of case study research is the fact that the boundary between the phenomenon and the context within which a case is being studied is not always discernible. Importantly, a case study is pertinent to answering the “who”, what”, where”, “how “and “why” research questions in both exploratory and explanatory studies (Saunders et al., 2012; Yin, 2014). The presented study has chosen a case study design to

Single case study designs are used to study a situation or context that is critical, unique, longitudinal case (Yin, 2014, p. 51) . Multiple case study design, on the other hand, attempts to replicate findings across multiple cases to enable the generalisation of the findings. Also, another important aspect of selecting cases in multiple case studies are the criteria and rationale for case selection (Gray, 2014; Yin, 2014). The conspicuous differences between holistic single and multiple cases studies are embedded in the unit of analysis. In holistic design, the unit of analysis is single, while an embedded approach employs multiple units of analysis. In other words, a multiple case design allows two or more cases to be replicated or deliberately