case studies and content analysis

• 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