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All research studies cases: instances or examples of particular things (e.g. people, animals, planets, companies, schools, works of art, elements, policies, ideas). This does not mean, however, that all research projects are case studies.

Much research takes an alternative approach, and focuses on specific and limited aspects of cases (commonly referred to as variables: e.g. people’s opinions, animals’ habits, planets’ orbits, companies’ balance sheets), measuring and exploring their variation, and relationships with other variables, for a given sample of cases. This is the more typical approach taken in scientific and/or quantitative research.

The term ‘case study’ is, or should be, reserved for a particular design of research, where the focus is on an in-depth study of one or a limited number of cases. In practice, however, its use is rather messier and more complex:

To refer to a work as a ‘case study’ might mean: (a) that its method is qualitative, small-N, (b) that the research is holistic, thick (a more or less comprehensive examination of a phenomenon), (c) that it utilizes a particular type of evidence (e.g. ethnographic, clinical, nonexperimental, non-survey-based, participant-observation, process-tracing, historical, textual or field research), (d) that its method of evidence gathering is naturalistic (a ‘real-life context’), (e) that the topic is diffuse (case and context are difficult to distinguish), (f) that it employs triangulation (‘multiple sources of evidence’), (g) that the research investigates the properties of a single observation, or (h) that the research investigates the properties of a single phenomenon, instance or example. (Gerring 2007, p. 17)

To compound matters further, Gerring (2007, p. 18) goes on to note that case study has a large number of variants or synonyms: ‘single unit, single subject, single case, N=1, case-based, case-control, case history, case method, case record, case work, within-case, clinical research’.

So what is a case study? Box 2.1 contains eleven definitions of case study, selected from among the many available in the literature, and organised by date. It illustrates both the development of our understanding of case study over time (the subject of the next section), and the similarities and differences in these understandings at any one time.