Нақты жағдайды терең зерттеу

In depth, detailed examination of a particular case
A case study is an in depth, detailed examination of a particular case (or cases) within a real world context. For example, case studies in medicine may focus on an individual patient or ailment; case studies in business might cover a particular firm's strategy or a broader market; similarly, case studies in politics can range from a narrow happening over time like the operations of a specific political campaign, to an enormous undertaking like world war, or more often the policy analysis of real world problems affecting multiple stakeholders. Generally, a case study can highlight nearly any individual, group, organization, event, belief system, or action. A case study does not necessarily have to be one observation (N=1), but may include many observations (one or multiple individuals and entities across multiple time periods, all within the same case study). Research projects involving numerous cases are frequently called cross case research, whereas a study of a single case is called within case research. Case study research has been extensively practiced in both the social and natural sciences.

Case studies have commonly been seen as a fruitful way to come up with hypotheses and generate theories. Classic examples of case studies that generated theories includes Darwin's theory of evolution (derived from his travels to the Easter Island), and Douglass North's theories of economic development (derived from case studies of early developing states, such as England). The concepts used in qualitative research will tend to have higher conceptual validity than concepts used in quantitative research (due to conceptual stretching: the unintentional comparison of dissimilar cases). and can have greater internal validity than quantitative studies. Case studies are suited to explain outcomes in individual cases, which is something that quantitative methods are less equipped to do. Case studies have been characterized as useful to assess the plausibility of arguments that explain empirical regularities. Case studies are also useful for understanding outliers or deviant cases. Case studies of cases that defy existing theoretical expectations may contribute knowledge by delineating why the cases violate theoretical predictions and specifying the scope conditions of the theory. They may also be more appropriate for empirical verifications of strategic interactions in rationalist scholarship than quantitative methods. Case studies can identify necessary and insufficient conditions, as well as complex combinations of necessary and sufficient conditions. They argue that case studies may also be useful in identifying the scope conditions of a theory: whether variables are sufficient or necessary to bring about an outcome. because few observations make it harder to estimate multiple causal effects, as well as increase the risk that there is measurement error, and that an event in a single case was caused by random error or unobservable factors. The purported "degrees of freedom" problem that KKV identify is widely considered flawed; while quantitative scholars try to aggregate variables to reduce the number of variables and thus increase the degrees of freedom, qualitative scholars intentionally want their variables to have many different attributes and complexity. By using Bayesian probability, it may be possible to makes strong causal inferences from a small sliver of data. KKV also identify inductive reasoning in qualitative research as a problem, arguing that scholars should not revise hypotheses during or after data has been collected because it allows for ad hoc theoretical adjustments to fit the collected data. However, scholars have pushed back on this claim, noting that inductive reasoning is a legitimate practice (both in qualitative and quantitative research). A commonly described limit of case studies is that they do not lend themselves to generalizability.

Teachers may prepare a case study that will then be used in classrooms in the form of a "teaching" case study (also see case method and casebook method). For instance, as early as 1870 at Harvard Law School, Christopher Langdell departed from the traditional lecture and notes approach to teaching contract law and began using cases pled before courts as the basis for class discussions. By 1920, this practice had become the dominant pedagogical approach used by law schools in the United States. Outside of law, teaching case studies have become popular in many different fields and professions, ranging from business education to science education. The Harvard Business School has been among the most prominent developers and users of teaching case studies. Teachers develop case studies with particular learning objectives in mind. Additional relevant documentation, such as financial statements, time lines, short biographies, and multimedia supplements (such as video recordings of interviews) often accompany the case studies. Similarly, teaching case studies have become increasingly popular in science education, covering different biological and physical sciences. The National Center for Case Studies in Teaching Science has made a growing body of teaching case studies available for classroom use, for university as well as secondary school coursework.