Guidelines for case study research

authors focus on one specific methodological aspect, such as on the use of existing cases in Lewis 1998. Barnes 2001 discusses the advantages and disadvantages of several measurement methods that can be used within case study research ethnography, interviews, strat- egy charting, questionnaires, and documentation. Welch 2000 focuses specifically on the use of archival records. Larsson 1993 advo- cates using case surveysto bridge the gap between surveys analysing too few variables and the in-depth, multi-aspect single case study.

2.2.3 Evaluations of case study research

Several authors claim that case study research can achieve the same sci- entific rigour as other research methodologies when correctly applied Lee, 1989; Meredith, 1998; Hudson, 2003; Peck, 2003. This of course begs the questions of how rigorously case studies are done in business research. Dubé and Paré 2003 list 53 quality criteria that they applied to pub- lished case study papers in management information systems MIS. They only considered papers that used case study research for theory- building or theory-testing purposes. In total, 183 such papers were found in seven major information system journals in the period 1990–1999. Dubé and Paré discovered that only 42 per cent of the publications stated a clear research question and only 8 per cent clearly stated their unit of analysis. In 85 per cent of the single case studies and 68 per cent of the multiple case studies, no case selection criterion was discussed. A total of 42 per cent did not discuss how data were collected and of the other 58 per cent, only 5 per cent described a case study protocol. Methods of data analysis were not sufficiently discussed in 77 per cent of the publica- tions and a clear chain of evidence was provided in only 19 per cent of the cases. Dubé and Paré concluded that a large portion of these publications lack rigour and that there is plenty of room for improvement. These results are consistent with the observation by Stuart et al. 2002 as well as by Hilmola et al. 2005 that most case study articles in the operations management and supply chain management literature do not sufficiently discuss methodological issues. Hilmola et al. further found that only 12 out of the 55 studied publications made adequate references to the literature on case study research methodology. Based on their experience as reviewers for case studies in operations man- agement journals, Stuart et al. 2002 state that many case study research papers indeed lack a discussion of fundamental aspects, such as a statement about the research aim, descriptions of the protocol, case selection criteria, measurement, and analysis. Also Meredith 2002 noted that case study methodology is often not well understood and not applied rigorously.

2.3 Conclusion

Whereas other researchers have investigated the use of case study research in a specific field, we provide an analysis of the broad field of business in the recent period 2000–2005. This allows us to compare the different business subfields. First of all, we observe that there are substan- tially more publications in ISI journals using case research on the subjects of Strategy, HRM, and Operations Management compared to only a few in Finance and Marketing. This conclusion is true for both absolute num- bers and relative percentages compared to the total number of publica- tions in the field. Furthermore, the case-based publications on Finance and Marketing topics do not appear in the core Finance and Marketing journals. This indicates that case study research is not a well-accepted method in Finance and Marketing research. The Operations Manage- ment case study publications, on the other hand, appear mainly in core operations management and operations research journals. Also in areas of HRM and Strategy, case study research is published in the respective core journals. We observe that publications related to these fields appear as well in Operations Management and Marketing journals. When we compare the review of the methodological papers with our findings from the first part of this chapter, we observe some gaps. First, while many authors advocate the use of case study research for either exploratory purposes or theory-testing, we found previously that cases are mostly used for illustration and exploration. A minority of published case studies in business research is theory-oriented, and theory-testing case studies are very rare. Second, review articles on case study research show that many case studies suffer from a lack of scientific rigour. It is against this background that this book was written in order to emphasize and clearly illustrate the usefulness of case study research for theory-testing, and how scientific rigour can be obtained.

2.4 References

Barnes, D. 2001, Research methods for the empirical investigation of the process of formation of operations strategy. International Journal of Operations Production Management, 218: 1076–1095. Chapter 2