Theme 6: Post reflections

This weeks theme, which also is the last theme in this course, was about qualitative research and case study research. Prior this theme i already gained knowledge around qualitative research and methods which was a part of last weeks theme "Design research". Therefore, the last seminar of this course held by Leif was mainly focused on case study research and therefore i primarily learned about case study.

When reading the assigned papers prior to this weeks theme i had a hard time grasping the difference between a case study and other research methods and how a case study is used in research. At first i thought that a case study is used in order to study a hypothesis or theories. However, it came to my understanding that a case study is rather the subject for the research, and that a case study generates theories and hypotheses rather than confirming them. This is in my opinion what makes studying cases interesting when conducting research, that you can encounter serendipities which results in new theories and hypotheses within the research area. Furthermore, I learned that when conducting a case study it is often so that both qualitative and quantitative methods are used to describe a phenomenon within it's "natural space", e.g. within a company, industry, country etc. An example by Leif was how doctors examine their patients, within the natural space of an individual, a doctor comes up with hypotheses concerning a persons condition depending on symptoms and examination, the case (the sick individual) is hypothesis generating and both qualitative (talking to the individual) and quantitative (measuring data such as blood pressure etc) are often used to provide hypotheses and theories about the persons condition, cause of sickness and how to provide a cure. I think that this theme was a really good last theme for this course since it sums up in which setting qualitative and quantitative methods combined are powerful in order to come up with new theories and hypotheses.