Case Study Guidelines
From COST Action FP0804: FORSYS
Revision as of 19:49, 7 September 2011 by SeanGordon (Talk | contribs)
Contents
Summary Case Study Discussion Points for Nov 2011 Meeting
Desired result
- outline of plan for conducting case studies, including decisions on purposes, methods (case definition, sampling, analysis), and reporting results
Purpose(s) of Case Studies
- (Forsys general) produce decision support guidelines
- Determined by each country or a common set of goals?
- Build on other Forsys work?
- Build on country reports
- Continue to implement individual country purposes chosen
- Use some common structures for comparability (problem types)
- types of case studies: exploratory, descriptive, explanatory
- Role of other WGs
Reporting results
- Possible audiences: academic, DSS developers, managers, funders
- Formats: wiki, country reports/book, other?
- How to collaborate across countries during development
Methods - Theory development
- One or more existing theories vs. grounded theory
- If purposes are different, relevant theories will be too
Methods - Case definition
- A particular DSS
- The application of a single DSS to a particular problem
- The application of DSS (possibly multiple) in a problem domain (eg fire)
Methods - Selecting studies
- How many are feasible?
- Replication strategy
- same DSS & same context, same DSS & different contexts, different DSS & same context, etc
Methods – Data sources & collection methods
- six general sources: documents, archival records, interviews, direct observation, participant observation, physical artifacts
