case studies and content analysis

Cards (7)

  • Case study
    A detailed study into the life of a person which covers great detail into their background
  • Strengths of case studies
    • Detailed so able to gain in depth insight
    • Forms basis for future research
    • From studying unusual cases you are able to infer things about normal usual behaviour of humans
    • Permits investigation of situations that would be otherwise unethical or impractical
  • Limitations of case studies
    • Not generalisable to wider populations as data is only gathered from one person
    • Various interviewer biases are presented like social desirability bias (from the unique person's side) and interpretative bias (from the researcher's side)
    • Retrospective studies may rely on memory which can be inaccurate
    • They are time consuming and difficult to replicate
  • Content analysis
    Studying human behaviour indirectly by studying things that we produce e.g. TV adverts, newspapers
  • How to conduct a content analysis
    1. Identify hypothesis
    2. Create a coding system
    3. Gather resources
    4. Conduct content analysis and record data
    5. Analyse data using thematic analysis
    6. Write up a report
  • Strengths of content analysis
    • Strong external validity as the data is already in the real world so it has high mundane realism
    • Produces large data set of both quantitative and qualitative data that is easy to analyse
    • Easy replication
    • Ethical issues like 'right of privacy, confidentiality, informed consent' are avoided as data is already in the public domain
  • Limitations of content analysis
    • Observer bias can be presented but it can be eliminated by achieving inter-observer reliability
    • Content of choice to analyse can be biased by researcher
    • Interpretative bias - the researcher may ignore some things but pay extra attention to others