processes of a case study methodology for postgraduate research in marketing

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European Journal of Marketing

ISSN : 0309-0566

Article publication date: 1 October 1998

Qualitative research has not been viewed as a rigorous alternative to established quantitative methods in postgraduate marketing research. However, this paper reports on the Australian development of a successful, structured approach to using the case study methodology in postgraduate research. Its aim is to present and justify guidelines for using the case study research methodology in honours, masters and PhD research theses, and so it should interest candidates and their supervisors. First, appropriate positions on a range of scientific paradigms and core issues of induction and deduction are established. Then implementation of the case study methodology is examined, including the numbers of case studies and of interviews. Unusual but effective uses of theoretical replication to rigorously analyze case study data are illustrated from postgraduate theses. Finally, a framework is provided for constructing a thesis, emphasizing the key methodology chapter.

• Case studies
• Marketing research
• Marketing theory
• Methodology

Perry, C. (1998), "Processes of a case study methodology for postgraduate research in marketing", European Journal of Marketing , Vol. 32 No. 9/10, pp. 785-802. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090569810232237

Copyright © 1998, MCB UP Limited

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Chad Perry: University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The writer thanks Len Coote for several ideas throughout this paper, Bina Shah for research assistance and other students for their examples and their assistance in the development of many of the ideas presented here. Remaining errors are the writer's. Early versions of the paper were presented at the 1994 National Conference of the Australia and New Zealand Association for Management and the Proceedings of the 1996 Staff Development Program on Postgraduate Supervision of Non-English Speaking Background Students.

Introduction

Case studies are familiar to marketing educators and their students as a teaching device. For example, the Harvard Business School's cases are widely used to allow students to be emotionally involved and learn action-related analysis of real, complex situations (Christensen and Hansen, 1987). However, although case studies can also be used as a research methodology (Easton, 1994a; Parkhe, 1993; Tsoukas, 1989; Yin, 1993, 1994), no journal of research case studies or case study methods exists and the most common social science and evaluation research methods textbooks "hardly mention case studies" (Yin, 1993, p. xi). Indeed, one survey of PhD dissertations in six fields concluded that case studies were inappropriate in postgraduate research, that is, one way to rectify the "mindless empiricism" of many doctoral dissertations would be to "simply eliminate ... case study dissertations" (Adams and White, 1994, p. 573).

This paper reports the Australian development of a successful, structured approach to using the case study methodology in postgraduate research. The paper is designed for postgraduate research students in marketing and their supervisors, for its aim is to present and justify guidelines for using the case study research methodology in honours, masters and PhD research theses. That is, only case studies used in postgraduate theses are considered, and not those used for other purposes such as consulting (Yin, 1994), program evaluation (Patton, 1990) or market research.

The paper's contribution to marketing education derives from its focus on structured, postgraduate research processes and from its detailed treatment of prior theory and induction in case study research. Marketing education will benefit from its rigorous procedures for postgraduate students to research complex, contemporary topics relevant to their current or future careers, about which little academic research has been published. Recent...

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Author: Perry, Chad

Source: European Journal of Marketing , Volume 32, Numbers 9-10, 1998, pp. 785-802(18)

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing Limited

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/03090569810232237

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Keywords: Australia ; Case studies ; Marketing research ; Marketing theory ; Methodology

Document Type: Research Article

Publication date: October 1, 1998

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• DOI: 10.1177/002224378502200209
• Corpus ID: 168125637

Case Research in Marketing: Opportunities, Problems, and a Process

• Published 1 May 1985
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Case Study Method: A Step-by-Step Guide for Business Researchers

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

Qualitative case study methodology enables researchers to conduct an in-depth exploration of intricate phenomena within some specific context. By keeping in mind research students, this article presents a systematic step-by-step guide to conduct a case study in the business discipline. Research students belonging to said discipline face issues in terms of clarity, selection, and operationalization of qualitative case study while doing their final dissertation. These issues often lead to confusion, wastage of valuable time, and wrong decisions that affect the overall outcome of the research. This article presents a checklist comprised of four phases, that is, foundation phase, prefield phase, field phase, and reporting phase. The objective of this article is to provide novice researchers with practical application of this checklist by linking all its four phases with the authors’ experiences and learning from recently conducted in-depth multiple case studies in the organizations of N...

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Qualitative case-study research has experienced an upsurge in business management fields of inquiry in the recent past. A methodology is selection, justification and sequential arranging of activities, procedures and tasks in a research project. Research methodology can no longer be confined to a set of universally applicable rules, conventions and traditions. A research paradigm is a set of propositions that explains how the world is perceived. There are three basic paradigms: positivist, interpretive and critical. Qualitative " approaches to research " , " strategies of inquiry " and " varieties of methodologies " classified into five " types " or " traditions " namely; biography, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography and case study. The major criticism made of qualitative methods is that they are impressionistic and non-verifiable, post-positivists who reject this charge claiming that qualitative data is auditable and therefore dependable. The less structured qualitative methodologies reject many of the positivists " constructions over what constitutes rigour, favouring instead the flexibility, creativity and otherwise inaccessible insights afforded by alternative routes of inquiry that embrace storytelling, recollection, and dialogue. Case study research is not really a " methodology " or a method, rather an approach to research. Case studies can be ethnographic or not and some scholars identified it as a strategy of social inquiry. It is argued that, case studies are more appropriate to investigate causal relationships prevailing both in the business field as well as in wider society in general.

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Social science researchers have made wide use of case study method to investigate contemporary real-life situations and provide the basis for the application of ideas and extension of methods. Hence, this article discusses several aspects of case study method in business. These include the definition, types and design of case study. It also confers on data collection method in case study that discusses in detail about interview, observation, and document analysis. The quality in case study and previous research that relate with case study also converse in this article. This study contributes and assists individuals or researchers to obtain ideas particularly in studies of real-life context governing social issues and problems.

Dr. BABOUCARR NJIE

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Mark N K Saunders , Bill Lee

Despite having a relatively recent history compared to other social sciences, the business and management field has proliferated into a number of largely independent disciplines. These include: accounting; corporate governance; entrepreneurship; finance; human resource management; international business and international management; leadership; management and business history; marketing and retail; operations and logistics; organizational behaviour; public management and governance; and strategy. Each of these disciplines has its own methodological predilections and as a corollary, a view of what constitutes a case study, where case studies should feature in a research project and the relative usefulness of case study research. Given this breadth of disciplines, only a provisional definition of a case study will be provided at this point; namely, a case study is research into a phenomenon, organization, process, or event that is studied as a unit of analysis that is interesting in its own right. Rather than attempting to summarise all that has been written about case studies across the management disciplines, this entry will elaborate upon thinking around this definition using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope.

Serbian Journal of Management

Milovan Vuković

Ali Haj Aghapour

Case-study as a qualitative research is a strongly debatable research strategy among all academicians and particularly practitioners. Therefore, in order to provide some upto-date insights into this controversial issue, the current paper seeks to investigate and document some aspects of case-study research. In fact, after reviewing some literatures in order to define, clarify and classify case-study research, the paper tries to consider and trade-off this qualitative strategy from different philosophical perspectives and approaches. Then, by relying on some recently outstanding papers and other highly recognized written resources, the paper gets into the appropriateness of casestudy including Generalizability, Validity, Construct validity, Internal validity and Reliability. Next, the role of case-study to build a social theory is investigated that leads to preset a step-bystep process to achieve this visionary goal. At the end, a brief comparison between case-study, as a common representative of qualitative research, and survey, an indicator of opposite view, is done. This paper contributes to research method’s development used by scholars looking to establish a case research by improving the level of understanding regarding the discussed issues. Index Terms- case-study appropriateness, case-study classification, case-study approaches.

South Asian Journal of Business and Management Cases

shreya mishra

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We receive a large number of manuscripts for possible publication in this journal. In reviewing them, we find that the bulk of them are from the area of crop sciences, livestock production and allied fields that have used experiments as the research strategy. The minority that falls in to the areas of agribusiness, agricultural economics and extension have used survey strategy. There is a lack of utilizing other research strategies in current research. Research has to be commenced with a clear direction and a clearly identified study process. These are primarily provided by its research strategy (Wedawatta, 2011). There are numerous strategies that a researcher can adopt to achieve the objectives of a particular research study. Some common research strategies are; experiment, survey, archival analysis, ethnography, action research, narrative inquiry, and the case study. This paper explains what a case study is and outlines the components of a case study. The Nature of a Case Study Yin (2003) defines case study as 'an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident'. A phenomenon and context are not always distinguishable in real-life situations. Therefore, a case study uses a large number of variables of interest than data points; and essentially relies on multiple sources of evidence for data triangulation. A historical viewpoint on case study strategy is presented in Tellis (1997). According to Yin (2003), case studies can be exploratory, explanatory or descriptive. Research in social sciences deals with interactions between institutions and human behaviour. These can be best studied in real-life settings and contexts. Sometimes an inquiry may be undertaken on an individual organization with a limited or a narrow population. These suggest qualitative investigations which are assessments of attitudes, opinions and behaviour (Kothari and Garg, 2018). These qualitative investigations are characteristic with the case study strategy. Whilst often been identified as interpretivist, case studies can also be used in positivistic research (Saunders et al. 2012).

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