case study psychology example

case study psychology example

The Impact of Case Studies in Psychology

1. Introduction

All manner of people in the world, including infants, children, and even adults, learn best from concrete examples as opposed to abstractions. To gain a better understanding of this basic psychological concept, the reader is encouraged to think about a young child who is learning the meaning of the word “dog.” If this child grows up in a household where two dogs are present, and is accustomed to calling these animals “dogs,” he will fully expect other similar-looking four-legged animals to be dogs as well. If this child encounters a cat in his living room and calls it a dog, he will be firm in his belief that the cat is indeed a dog. Imagine now attempting to convince this child that he was mistaken, and that the cat in question is not a dog. The child will be puzzled, and would likely continue to call the cat a dog in the future. Now consider an alternative situation where a different young child is learning the same vocabulary. This child has never had a pet of any kind, and has never seen anyone else’s pet. His only experiences with animals are with squirrels, birds, and insects. If this child sees a photo of a dog in a book, he will likely confuse the animal in the picture with a large type of squirrel or some sort of strange-looking cat. In an attempt to learn the meaning of the word “dog,” this child will be confused by the multitude of animals he encounters. Now compare the learning process of these two children to a college undergraduate enrolled in an introductory psychology course who is attempting to grasp a difficult concept from his textbook. In all three cases, the learners would benefit most from concrete examples pertaining to their respective experiences. For the psychology student, these examples might come in the form of case studies.

2. Importance of Case Studies in Psychology

Because case studies are a qualitative research method, they are an ideal way to explain complex phenomena. They are often the only way to study unusual events or conditions that would be unethical to study in other ways; for example, in an earlier study Roffey (1972) was able to use a case study to investigate the effects of institutionalization on 11 children following their movement from a children’s home to a long stay ward in a psychiatric hospital. It would not have been possible to use an experiment as it would have meant deliberately causing harm to the participants. Case studies are also useful for testing whether scientific theories and concepts actually apply to the real world. For example, an in-depth study on the patients of a GP (general practitioner, a doctor who is not a specialist) to test the theory that they are poor at diagnosing mental illness would be a case study, providing the results were published widely (e.g. in the BMJ). The patients would give their consent and it is highly unlikely that harm would come out of the study. The case study is the only method which gathers data on the whole population, hence making it the most valid of all research methods. It is quite likely that case studies are the most popular of all research methods in psychology, but there are fewer high quality case studies than any other method, because it is often a difficult and demanding option. This can lead to a type of research bias in which the most interesting and unusual cases are over-represented. Despite these potential problems, the case study has been accepted in principle by most fields in psychology.

3. Methodology of Case Study Research

Case study methodology has long been a contested terrain in social sciences research, which is characterized by varying, sometimes opposing, approaches espoused by many research methodologists. Despite being one of the most frequently used qualitative research methodologies in educational research, the methodologists do not have a full consensus on the design and evaluation of case study research, hence there is a lack of understanding about the methodology of case study research altogether. The variety of definitions for case study research, which come from different disciplines or from different researchers using their own discipline perspective, demonstrates how case study research is defined in different ways. As stated by Johansson, it is a theoretical term which has not been fully defined in a theoretical context. Simulation of a definitional process does not greatly enhance understanding, although doing so is helpful in determining the depth and breadth of the research. It would be more beneficial to perform a tracking study to identify how the definition is being used by an investigator and whether it is serving to advance the goals of the research. In a holistic analysis, the identification of the evolving nature of the investigation fits the case. This changes the initial definition and various meanings emerge relative to different stages of the study. This approach suggests that what is being studied in the case is more relevant than how it is studied. This means that the researcher should have a complete understanding of the case and the simultaneous processes going on in it. This understanding comes from the sociocultural traditions of the case and speculation from the construction of the mirrored case or case system.

4. Analysis and Findings

In order to keep the study’s length within sensible bounds, we are not presenting all our analysis in this article. However, our seven topic areas can each generate a large number of findings, and we found the best way of organizing these included making matrices and network trees. These methods were used to compare associations between different codes and hence parts of the data and to give an overall or global picture for a topic area. This was useful since often our findings on a particular topic were not disparate but rather complex and interwoven. The network trees, in particular, were helpful for producing a graphical structure of the data and testing the fit of specific instances of data with the coding context. These were produced with the aid of various software attributing file and display functions, but the most laborious part of the data display process was the writing of retrieval and position commands to format the trees and matrices. Finally, output functions were used to produce summaries of data and memos for checking in writing up topics. This was particularly helpful as it ensured we had not missed any key bits of data and provided an overall and open-ended way of checking the validity of our findings.

Coding the findings involved breaking the data down into chunks. We moved the raw data backwards and forwards between quotes and memos and used the code feature to identify segments of the data of theoretical interest. We often moved from one stage to the other and back again. Our basic aim was to generate and test theory, and we would use the code feature to gather data together in a way that was theoretically relevant and then compare it with other data. Although we are not concerned here with the specifics of the theories, we found the whole process was considerably eased by use of theoretical memos. These allowed us to look at individual codes and pieces of the data in the context of the overall picture we had for a particular area of the analysis. At times, this part of the process was very taxing, but the use of the software undoubtedly made the analysis more rigorous and systematic and helped to integrate the data and the theory. Overall, we found our familiarity with the software was an important factor in allowing us to do a particularly refined and exhaustive analysis. The software also immensely assisted the process of data display.

5. Conclusion

Whereas others, upon scrutinizing the practice, have found case studies to be a method more suitable for hypothesis generation and a piece of research to understand an intricate phenomenon. This is supported by Yin (1984) who theorizes that when the issue being investigated is contemporary and the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident, a case is the ideal thing to study. This is because the case study method, through the use of multiple sources of evidence and the employment of theoretical propositions, can provide a more in-depth understanding of a specific instance of a phenomenon, helping to explain or build theory about said phenomenon.

Case study methodology has long been a contested terrain in social sciences research and the conduct of one type of design in particular is the subject of a great deal of scrutiny, that is the single case study. In the early 1980s, a psychologist named Michael Scriven suggested that a single case study can be used for psychological research (N=1) and provide, when aggregating evidence, the same methodological rigor and representativeness that is associated with group research. This perspective is what divides the rumble, some believing that the single case study is the same as the experimental one, with the only difference being that its unit of generalization is not a group or groups, but rather a group level statistics or causal relations (Shadish, Cook, and Campbell, 2002).