Using Case Studies as a Research Approach

Cohen and Manion (1994), in their introduction to research methods in education, presented a binary view of the social sciences, and suggested that the assumptions made about the nature of social science would affect the approach taken by the researcher. Denzin and Lincoln (1998: 8-9) made a similar argument, suggesting that a belief that reality was ‘out there to be studied, captured, and understood’ led to a normative, quantitative research paradigm, whereas a view that ‘reality can never be fully apprehended, only approximated’ led to an interpretive, qualitative research paradigm. In thinking about the best possible approach for my study therefore, I needed to be clear first what assumptions undergirded my research questions. I was seeking to describe and understand the ways in which pre-service teachers reconciled and resisted the discourses that influenced their subject conceptions as well as the decisions that teachers made about how to perform ‘good’ teaching and its relationships to the subject conceptions articulated. This necessitated an understanding of each respondent’s contextual situation. Patton (1985: 1) suggested that when the effort is ‘to understand situations in their uniqueness as part of a particular context’ and when this ‘understanding is an end

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in itself’, an interpretive approach was called for – one that strove for ‘depth of understanding’.

A positivist approach towards my research would not do justice to the complex and multi-faceted nature of the phenomena I sought to understand. Merriam (1998: 6) suggested that while quantitative research took apart a phenomenon to examine its component parts, a strength of interpretive research is its ability to reveal how ‘all the parts work together to form a whole’. While a quantitative approach might help to identify the factors that affected teachers’ thinking and decision making, it would not be able to describe in detail how these factors interacted, for example. I therefore decided that my research called for a data-rich interpretive approach that placed respondents at the heart of the project. Indeed, other recent studies on subject conceptions also used the interpretive approach in order to describe their respondents’ knowledge and beliefs and to understand the influences that shaped them (Corney, 2000; Martin, 2005; Hopwood, 2006; Brooks, 2007).

There are various ways in which a researcher interested in interpretive research can go about designing a research strategy. Yin (1994) suggested that the research questions would determine if a case study approach was an appropriate research strategy. A case study design would be employed to gain an in-depth understanding of a situation and uncover meaning for those involved. The interest lay in the process rather than in outcomes, in context rather than in specific variables, and in discovery rather than confirmation (Merriam, 1998: 19). Bromley (1986: 23) argued that case studies would

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get as close to the ‘subject of interest as they possibly can by means of direct access to subjective factors’ (thoughts, feelings, desires), and ‘spread the net of evidence widely’. Provided that the research was set up and conducted properly, this approach therefore had great internal validity for my research because it set out to describe and understand what was being studied as thoroughly and holistically as possible (Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Bromley, 1986).

The Case Study Approach

What makes a case study approach different from other types of interpretive research is that it involves intensive descriptions and analyses of a single unit or bounded system (Smith, 1978), be it at the level of the individual, or a school, or a community. Stake (1995: 2) also defined the case as ‘an integrated system’, while Miles and Huberman (1994: 25) presented the case as a phenomenon of some sort ‘occurring in a bounded context’. While the scale of the case might vary, what made something a case was its intrinsically bounded nature. My study aimed to discover how an individual reconciled (and resisted) discourse in his/her own academic and personal contexts to articulate subject conceptions of geography and to study the relationships between these conceptions and the decisions made about performing ‘good’ teaching during Teaching Practice. Each pre-service teacher (or case) was examined in relation to his/her particular context. This context was a multi-tiered and complex one, incorporating (as discussed in Chapters Two and Three) the national education, subject, teacher education, school and personal contexts. Given the complex interactions between discourses within these different contexts and the individual’s own unique responses towards them, a case

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study approach was most appropriate in helping to unpack and understand these complex interactions.

Case studies have been criticized (Yin, 1994; Tripp, 1985) for lacking reliability (the extent to which research findings could be replicated) as well as generalisability (the extent to which the results could be applied to other cases). These critiques stemmed, however, from a view that reality was single-faceted, objective and static. When one accepted that reality was complex and multi-faceted, socially constructed and changing, these conceptualisations of reliability and generalisability needed to be recast. Lincoln and Guba (1985: 288) argued that rather than expect the same result to be replicated, it would be more useful to think about the dependability or consistency of the results with the data collected. They suggested careful attention to the researcher’s position within the research project, using multiple methods of data collection and analysis, and leaving an audit trail so that external judges could authenticate the findings of the study.

It would also be unfair to expect the results of case study research to be applicable to many other cases because ‘a single case or small non-random sample is selected precisely because the researcher wants to understand the particular in depth, not to find out what is generally true of many’ (Merriam, 1988: 208). Sayer (2000) also noted that generalisability only indicated that a relationship was common, but did not help us to understand its nature. Brooks (2007) suggested that the question therefore was how the relationship in each case could be described and understood, which then allowed for similarities or differences across different cases to be identified. I would suggest that

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having a conceptual framework that examined the relationships within each case in a systematic way (as I have suggested in Chapter Two) goes some way in helping to make the type of meaningful cross-case analyses that Brooks (2007) alluded to.