How to solve case study

This article is about Case study. For Case teaching method used for business education, see case method. For method of teaching law in the United States law schools, see case method.
A case study is one of several ways of doing research whether it is social science related or even socially related. It is an intensive study of a single group, incident, or community.Other ways include experiment or analysis of archival information .
Case selection -
When selecting a case for a case study, researchers often use information-oriented sampling , as opposed to random . This is because an average case is often not the richest in information. Extreme or atypical cases reveal more information because they activate more basic mechanisms and more actors in the situation studied. In addition, from both an understanding-oriented and an action-oriented perspective, it is often more important to clarify the deeper causes behind a given problem and its consequences than to describe the symptoms of the problem and how frequently they occur. Random samples emphasizing representative ness will seldom be able to produce this kind of insight; it is more appropriate to select some few cases chosen for their validity.
Three types of information-oriented cases may be distinguished:
1.Extreme or deviant cases
2.Critical cases
3.Paradigmatic ca
4.Extreme case
The extreme case can be well-suited for getting a point across in an especially dramatic way, which often occurs for well-known case studies such as in frauds `Wolf-man.’
Critical case --
A critical case can be defined as having strategic importance in relation to the general problem. For example, an occupational medicine clinic wanted to investigate whether people working with organic solvents suffered brain damage. Instead of choosing a representative sample among all those enterprises in the clinic’s area that used organic solvents, the clinic strategically located , ‘If it is valid for this case, it is valid for all (or many) cases.’ In its negative form, the generalization would be, ‘If it is not valid for this case, then it is not valid for any (or only few) cases.’
For more on case selection, see
Assumptions
1. Cases selected based on dimensions of a theory (pattern-matching) or on diversity on a dependent phenomenon (explanation-building).
2. No generalization to a population beyond cases similar to those studied.
3. Conclusions should be phrased in terms of model elimination, not model validation. Numerous alternative theories may be consistent with data gathered from a case study.
4. Case study approaches have difficulty in terms of evaluation of low-probability causal paths in a model as any given case selected for study may fail to display such a path, even when it exists in the larger population of potential cases