Personally, I have sort of been using a case study methodology but without me knowing it. Almost two years ago, in 2012, me and Axel Hammarbäck wrote our bachelor thesis together about gamification and how gamification can be applied to math education and possibly improve students understanding of mathematics. Our methodology was based on a math game that we created and tried on some secondary school pupils at a school in Stockholm. On the occasion, we evaluated their skills before and after, and also used interviews, questionaries and observations to triangulate and find out what the pupils attitude were against such an application.
Comparing our methodology to the one that Eisenhardt describes in his article, one can see some similarities but also differences. Firstly, we used theory and other applications to build one main research questions that was to be answered with the help of three sub-questions. We didn't not have an hypothesis but just a main focus that we wanted to answer.
After we were done with the focus, we tried to find a case or setting to investigate. We found a high-school that let us in to do our study that fur filled some criteria that our research focus demanded and went through with our study. After transcribing all the data, we started to analyse it in search for general trends and general patterns in the data. These trends and pattern together later formed our conclusions and our theory building.
As mentioned before, I had no idea that we actually performed a case study when we wrote our thesis. For me, case studies were something that economists and law students used in everyday education, the familiarise themselves with their future work that often is case based. Reading the article of Eisenhardt, I quickly saw the similarity and understood both what was good with our metrology and what could have been improved. See, what we did not do was to search for cross-case patterns or validate through other experiments. Of course, lack of time were an issue, but the research would probably have gained a lot from doing the same study on a different setting.
Hey! It was interesting that you had carried out your own study into gamification and tested it out on pupils. My question is related to them - what, in your experiences, were the positives and negatives from working with pupils or children in relation to your feedback? As Ylva was saying in her lecture, she did not get that much useful feedback from pupils!
SvaraRadera