Case studies
"A case study is one of several ways to conduct social and political science research. The term has several meanings in the research literature. Case study can be used to describe a unit of analysis (e.g., for an organization, a country, an event, or a person); a research method (generally as a qualitative inquiry); or a research strategy that investigates single or multiple cases using participant observations, interviews, surveys, and statistical data."
Kurian, G. T. (2011). Case studies. In The Encyclopedia of Political Science (pp. 199-199). CQ Press, https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781608712434.n204
Ways to locate case studies in Concordia Library databases
1. Use the Sofia Discovery Tool and use "case studies" as a phrase in your search. For instance, if you needed to find case studies on democracy in European countries, you could do the following search: democracy AND Europe* AND "case studies"
Search tips:
- Always capitalize AND / OR when searching.
- Putting an * at the end of a root word, will find all the variations on that word, in the example above Europe* will find europe and european in the results
- Placing quotation marks around any two or more words, like "case studies" will search them as a complete phrase
In the Sofia search results you will find books, book chapters and journal articles that contain case studies.
Search tip: You can use the limiters on the left hand menu in Sofia to narrow your results down to journal articles, print books, or ebooks
2. You can search for case studies as a document type in the journal article database Political Science Complete.
On the deafult search page, you can enter your keywords to search in database, but before you click search, scroll down past the search boxes.
Until you see the section for Limit your results -> Document Type and select Case Study from the list.
Your search results should contain case studies from scholarly journal articles.
