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Report formats for Case Studies

The case study explains, describes or explores a person, group, phenomena, or event in order to
provide insight into the subject, event, phenomena in question.

Title

The title allows researchers to identify the source. It should be a maximum of 10 words and use
recognizable keywords.

The Abstract

Abstracts are important because they give a first impression of the document that follows, letting
readers decide whether to continue reading and showing them what to look for if they do.
Though some abstracts only list the contents of the document, the most useful abstracts tell the
reader more. An abstract should represent as much as possible of the quantitative and qualitative
information in the document, and also reflect its reasoning. Typically, an informative abstract
answers these questions in about 100-250 words:

• Why did you do this study or project?

• What did you do, and how?

• What did you find?

• What do your findings mean?

Here are some other points to keep in mind about abstracts:

• An abstract will nearly always be read along with the title, so do not repeat or rephrase
the title. It will likely be read without the rest of the document, however, so make it
complete enough to stand on its own.

• Your readers expect you to summarize your conclusions as well as your purpose,
methods, and main findings. Emphasize the different points in proportion to the emphasis
they receive in the body of the document.

• Do not refer in the abstract to information that is not in the document.

• Avoid using I or we, but choose active verbs instead of passive when possible (the study
tested rather than it was tested by the study).

• Avoid if possible trade names, acronyms, abbreviations, or symbols. You would need to
explain them, and that takes too much room.
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• Use key words from the document. (For published work, the abstract is "mined" for the
words used to index the material—thus making it more likely someone will cite your
article.)

Source: http://www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/specific-types-of-writing/abstract

Introduction

The aims, context and things you think are linked to the question/hypothesis. Remember to
reference any work you are quoting from other sources.

1. Provide background into the subject you are analyzing and define the subject.
2. Ask questions such as why the study was done?
3. Discuss relevant literature and studies you have analyzed prior to the question/hypothesis
you have developed.
4. Discuss why it is important.
5. Explain how you go to your analysis how did you end up with this particular question/
hypothesis to be analyzed.
6. State the Question/hypothesis and how you will go about answering or proving it.

Methodology/Research Methods

The methodology describes how you went about your research.

This area of the case study focuses on the way in which you did the research. It could be
labelled Methodology or Research Methods or some other term. You could continue to write
about the methods used under the main title or you could decide to use sub headings. Here are
some statements, which may help you structure this section.

Let’s supposed you were analysing elementary school children and how they interact with a
smartboard. Some questions you should answer for the methodology are the following.

1. What was the size and nature of the group you were looking at?
2. When and where did the study take place?
3. Outline the procedures that were followed.
4. The ethics of research are sometimes quite important so you will make mention here of
the permissions you have gained and of any control groups and their roles. Do the pupils
know that they are involved in a research process?
5. How did you carry out the actual research and why?
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For example, if you were observing students and their interactions with a whiteboard, Did you
use a digital camera or digital video camera? If you did then how did you attempt to analyse your
collected observations. Did you use an observation schedule? If your observations were not
linked to an observation schedule and were therefore unstructured how did you record them? Did
you write up the notes as you observed them or were they reflective notes?

6. Did you interview the pupil(s)? Was the interview structured or unstructured?
7. Did you use a questionnaire in the research? Why was this a good method to use? How
did you structure the questions? Did you trial the questionnaire before using it?
8. What documentation did you look at? Planning documents, pupil's work or other bits and
pieces?

Findings/Results

This section discusses the results of the investigation and what answers they give you.

1. Describe the major findings from your observations. If you have carried out structured
observations present your overall findings, not the details. Try and put them in a way that
readers will understand.

2. Put your findings in a well labelled table.

3. If you used interviews as a method, talk about how the interviews went and include
important extracts from the individuals studied. It may be useful to present these in
italics.

4. If you used a questionnaire discuss what the individuals revealed. Do not focus on trivial
details but rather the main findings.

Conclusions/Discussion

This section draws all the elements of your case study together. It contextualizes and critically
analyzes the study and draws conclusions.

You might start by revisiting the questions/hypothesis that you were asking and link these to
your research/observations. Here you are expected to interpret the results. Speculation is
acceptable when identified as such. State the answer to your question or the acceptance/rejection
of the hypothesis.

1. Interpret the results what are the overall ideas

2. Cross reference the information. How do your results connect with other surveys on the
same topic?
3. Speculation is acceptable if stated as such.
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4. Accept/reject the hypothesis and state why

5. Discuss the limitations of the research
6. Offer further research ideas.

Fig. 1 An example of the level of activity and types of involvement for the Paintbook activity
using an interactive whiteboard.

For example supposing the graph above was of children using a whiteboard:

The graph above (Fig 2) was very different from a similar graph when the children were not
involved in an ICT activity (Fig 1). The evidence from the video, particularly sequence 7
illustrates the levels of interactions between the children at the whiteboard and supports the data
from the observation schedules. However the video evidence from sequence 9 also contradicts
the observation schedule. This latter case might be because at that point of time the software

being used was in an uneventful mode and the children were distracted by other events occurring
in the classroom.

Finally the Conclusion is also a place to raise questions that remain unanswered and to discuss
ambiguous data. You could therefore finish by doing a critique of the methods you used in the
case study and by suggesting other questions that arose which you might like to investigate
further.

References

The references will provide information that allows the reader to locate the references that are
cited in your work. List only the references that are referred to in the text.