Case Study

The case study method places the emphasis on an in-depth, detailed study of one particular case, chosen because it can shed light on a phenomenon that is not yet well understood. The 'case' can be a single individual with some distinguishing characteristic (such as a patient showing a particular psychological disorder), a small group of people who share something in common (such as a set of creative writers), an institution (a school or corporate office that is functioning particularly poorly or particularly well), or a specific event (children exposed to a disaster such as a tsunami, war, or pollution). Because the cases chosen for study are unique, they tend to be unusually rich sources of information. A case study typically draws on multiple methods together, interview, observation, and psychological tests, gathering information from a range of respondents connected to the case in different ways, and it aims to produce a narrative, detailed account of the events that make up a person's (or group's, or institution's) life or experience. The case study has proven historically important in clinical psychology and human development: Freud's observations of individual patients, meticulously recorded, formed the basis of psychoanalytic theory, and Piaget built his theory of cognitive development on careful case observations of his own three children. Case studies have also been used to study patterns of socialisation, for example, Minturn and Hitchcock's case study of the socialisation of Rajput children in Khalapur, and S. Anandalakshmy's case study of aspects of childhood among a community of weavers in Varanasi. Despite these strengths, generalising from a single case study calls for real caution, since establishing the validity of a finding based on just one case is genuinely difficult; good practice is therefore to gather information through multiple strategies, from multiple sources, and, where possible, with more than one investigator involved, while carefully maintaining a clear chain of evidence linking every piece of data …