Key Concepts

At the simplest level, therefore, action research involves a spiral or cycle of planning, action, monitoring and reflection:

The intrinsic case study, where the interest is in the case for its own sake, based on uniqueness. a researcher examines the case for its own sake. For instance, why does student A, age eight, fail to read when most children at that age can already read?

The Multi-Site Study is a qualitative research approach that we designed to gain an in-depth knowledge of an organizational phenomenon that had barely been researched: strategic scanning. It combines several approaches to case study research, borrowing from the positivist tradition, the interpretative approach and the qualitative research corpus.

Theory-guided case studies are also idiographic, in that they aim to explain and/or interpret a single historical episode rather than to generalize beyond the data. Unlike inductive case studies, they are explicitly structured by a well-developed conceptual framework that focuses attention on some theoretically specified aspects of reality and neglects others.