Case study

Case study
A case-study is an in-depth study of an individual unit - individual, group, institution or process. The advantage of the case study method is that it allows more intensive analyses of specific empirical details. Case studies are used both as research methods and as methods for other purposes, e.g. education.

Methodologically and epistemologically are case studies associated with the problem about ideographical versus homothetic research.

The case-study method may give rise to the production of certain genres or document types such as scientific biographies, anthologies with important "cases" and case histories (such as Sigmund Freud's "Dora", "The Rat Man" and "The Wolf Man").

I information science the case study method has, for example, been used in the study of indexing (Barber; Moffat; Wood & Bawden, 1988) and researchers literature searching (Hjørland, 1986/1988).

Case studies are often considered important also for educational purposes.

Literature:

Barber, J.; Moffat, S.; Wood, F. & Bawden, D. (1988). Case studies of the indexing and retrieval of pharmacology papers. Information Processing & Management, 24(2), 141-150.

Chen, Y. N. & Chen, S. J. (2004). A metadata practice of the IFLA FRBR model - A case study for the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Journal of Documentation, 60(2), 128-143.

Cox, R. J. & Rasmussen, E. (1997). Reinventing the information professions and the argument for specialization in LIS education: Case studies in archives and information technology Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 38(4), 255-267.

Harris, M. R. (2005). The librarian's roles in the systematic review process: a case study. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 93(1), 81-87.

Hjørland, B. (1986). Litteratursøgning i forskning. Et eksempel og nogle vigtige implikationer. SAML. Skrifter om Anvendt og Matematisk Lingvistik, 12, 79-102.

Hjørland, B. (1988). Information Retrieval in Psychology. Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian, 6(3/4), 39‑64. Click for full-text IR in psychol_1988.PDF

Kuhlthau, C. C. (1988). Longitudinal case studies of the information search process of users in libraries. Library & Information Science Research, 10(3), 257-304.

McCormick, B. P. (1996). N=1: What can be learned from the single case? Leisure Sciences, 18(4), 365-369.

Rao, P. G. (1977). Homonyms in Dewey Decimal Classification, Edition 18 - Case studies. Library Science with a slant to documentation, 14(3-4), 120-123.

Van der Blonk, H. (2003). Writing case studies in information systems research. Journal of Information Technology, 18(1), 45-52.

Walsham, G. (1995). Interpretive case-studies in IS research - Nature and method. European Journal of Information Systems, 4(2), 74-81.