Case studies

This resource will help you:

• Enhance your awareness around the principles of case study assessment tasks.  
• Develop your understanding about the process of writing a case study.
• Develop your skills in creating and structuring case studies that are credible and well-supported.

A case study is a detailed analysis of a real or hypothetical situation, event, organisation, individual or issue. A case study requires you to identify key elements, issues or themes and connect these to theory.

Examples of case studies include:

• Health: A patient scenario where you must identify the health issues and recommend appropriate care or interventions. 
• Business: A detailed report for a company that is looking to expand to a new market.
• Law: For a legal dispute, identifying relevant legal issues, applying laws or precedents, and arguing possible outcomes.  
• Environmental science: Exploring an ecosystem, identifying key environmental issues and applying theory to explain the interrelationships of these issues.
• Cyber security: For a given company, identifying vulnerabilities, applying theory to understand these and making recommendations to mitigate threats.  

This video (4:07 min) from Academic Educational Materials (2016) gives an overview of the purpose of case studies, as well as some different types of case studies. 

• Write in a descriptive and formal/objective (third person) style. 
• Include detail, facts, and experience from the case. 
• Analyse and apply to the case what you have learned in your course. 
• Use a mixture of paraphrasing about relevant concepts and theory and sentences that link back to details in the case. 
• Incorporate relevant academic literature, theories, and sources, and use in-text citations for these. 

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