I see the term “case study” used frequently in PR, marketing and management research – but often it is used to describe a very informal and arbitrary descriptive narrative.  To me,  “case study” should refer to a specific research methodology for making consistent comparisons and measurements of two or more subjects, particularly when combining multiple and unstructured sources of information.

It’s not a complicated tool, but a useful one for conducting background, literature, and internet research in a systemized fashion.  The basic process includes:

1. Ask what dimensions are measurable given the available data, and what will be useful to measure.
2. For each dimension, establish consistent criteria for measurement, boundaries and limitations, and how it should be measured.
3. Construct a “template” or outline which will be filled out for each case.

The template should still include a section for a narrative description of what makes each case unique, such as its history and individual characteristics.  The most important task is the development of dimension variables and how they are assigned, but the only real rule is that you are consistent.  Dimensions can include existing quantitative data (for example, “number of full time employees” for company case studies), or subjectively assigned values.  Subjective assignment can be performed using rank ordering by the researcher or another source (for example, “best restaurants in town” as ranked by personal experience), or assignment to a Likert scale (local restaurants scored from 1 to 7 where 1 indicates “Very Bad”, 3 indicates “Average”, and 7 indicates “Very Good”).

A simple example is how Wikipedia handles articles about corporations – it includes narratives, timelines, histories, and that nice little box of “quick facts” in the top right corner which tends to be pretty consistent across different articles.  Just like in the Wikipedia example, there’s nothing that says you can’t include multimedia in a case study research project.

Consistent assignment of dimensions will enable the researcher to perform simple descriptive statistics and graphs, and even create combined rankings that weight and combine values from different dimensions.   A completed case study report should consist of the following:

1. Summary / overview
2. A definition of how dimensions were measured, including sources
3. Individual cases, all using the same template
4. A “meta” analysis, that provides descriptive statistics and analyses of case-by-case measurements

A well defined – even if it is short and sweet – case study plan will help you get more useful information from your background research phase, and help you present the results in a more useful and understandable format.  Just remember the key word – consistency.

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