Case studies target specific group or segment and aims to address their problems in the light of research question. However, conducting a case study is not an easy task and it requires many efforts. Here are some guidelines from the start until end that can help you in accomplishing a successful case study research:
Read and Explore
Doing research before finalizing topic for your case study is very important and you must spend some time in knowing that what has been done previously on the relevant topic. Some researchers finalize the topic for case study, but are unable to find any relevant literature. This creates many problems and can result in changing of the topic. Doing research on that topic helps you to identify that how you can carry forward your research work and hence can make your case study applicable and publishable. You can even use the methodology that someone has used in his/her research work that is relevant to yours.
Develop research questions
This is one of the important phases of your case study. You might have thought about raw questions before finalizing your topic; however, now is the time to give your work a final shape. Therefore, develop your question after comprehensive review of relevant literature. Sometimes it is difficult to form the question even after reviewing the literature. In such cases try to reach the people directly before finalizing your research question. Try to have a discourse with your target research group and it will help you to identify that what sort of research questions you can form.
Case studies usually involve primary research and hence the problems can vary depending on the culture, geographic location and few other factors. Therefore, sometimes experts also advise to do some unstructured survey. It helps to identify the major problems and hence you can carry forward towards structured survey that exactly aims to answer your research question.
Conduct research
This is one the important phase as you have to ensure that you get the complete response from the respondents in the right manner. Care should be taken that interviews or questionnaires should be made simple and understandable for the respondents. It will help you to get accurate results. Do keep the statistical rules in your mind if you are doing quantitative research.
Final analysis
Keep a proper record of the data so that you can easily proceed to analysis. The analysis plan should be mentioned in the methodology. You can choose any methodology, depending on the nature of your study. If you are doing primary research, use some statistical software to make your results more accurate. Using statistical software products like STATA, SPSS for quantitative studies help to make your results more persuasive.
Do final formatting and proofread
Once you are done with your results and analysis, give the final formatting that is required for the case study. These final formatting is usually given in the light of the standard formats. Hence, after formatting it, proofread it yourself or give it to your friend to proofread it for you. It will help you to correct the mistakes that usually go unnoticed while writing your case study. You can also avail service of some online proofreading companies in order to ensure that your final draft is perfect.
About the Author
Sarah is an English language teacher in a high school and she is fond of guiding other people about English language. She is working as a freelance writer from the past three years and her writing interest include essay writing, essay proofreading and vocabulary. She loves to bake cakes on holidays. She also writes for Galaxyessay.com which is a reliable essay writing service.
