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Table 4.5 Five Misunderstandings About Case Study Research (Adapted from Flyvbjerg, 2006, p. 219–245)

Misunderstanding

Restatement

1. General knowledge is more valuable than context-specific knowledge.

Universals cannot be found in the study of human affairs. Context-dependent knowledge is more valuable. Formal generalisation is overvalued as a source of scientific development; the force of a single example is underestimated. The case study is useful for both generating and testing hypotheses, but is not limited to these activities. There is no greater bias in case study towards confirming preconceived notions than in other forms of research. Difficulty in summarising case studies is due to properties of the reality studied, not the research method.

2. One cannot generalise from a single case, so a single case does not add to scientific development. 3. The case study is most useful in the first phase of a research process; used for generating hypotheses. 4. The case study confirms the researcher’s preconceived notions.

5. It is difficult to summarise case studies into general propositions and theories.

Case study research has been, on occasions, used as a ‘catch-all design’ for some qualitative descriptive studies that do not fit traditional frameworks (Merriam, 2009). As Tight (2010) stated, in some reported case studies, it has been a ‘convenient label for our research—when we ‘can’t think of anything “better”’—in an attempt to give [qualitative methodology] some added respectability’ (p. 337). This lack of thoroughness, uniformity and consensus in the rigour of writing up or reporting ‘case study’ research has created fodder for the critics of case methodology. For example, some studies use a ‘case report method’, which is not in fact a case study (Creswell, 2013; Merriam, 2009; Stake, 1995; Yin, 2009). Purported case studies presenting data from small samples of no more than three people, places or phenomena are not case studies (Hyett et al., 2014), nor are ‘case