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Question on case study research
It’s already been more than a week ago since we covered the topic of case study reserach, but I still want to clarify something I might not have understood properly.
It’s about the proper usage of “unit of analysis”.
Let’s take a single case integrated case study (according to Yin, 2009) of a company. The main method of data collection in the company is interviews with different employees coming from different departments or business units in order to gathering data for a strategy that needs to be developed.
When I want to describe the research design, what information about the unit of analysis should I include?
Thanks in advance!
Thanks for your post.
I am not sure if I understood your question correctly.
In a single-case case study, you can have multiple units of analysis too. Your case could be the company. Within this case you can have multiple units of analysis (which share the same context and therefor do not constitute multiple cases). I am not sure whether Yin (2009) suggests specific information that needs to be included to describe a unit of analysis.
What your specific unit(s) of analysis will be, depends on your research question and your studied phenomenon. For example if you want to study the relationships between the departments in your organization, then your units of analysis could be pairs of departments and their relationship, or if you want to study cultural diversity among the departments, then your units of analysis could be the departments.
Thanks for your reply, you understood my question correctly.