During the last seminar of the course we discussed what a case study is. Leif talked about two examples of case studies. He mentioned the police and said that solving a crime could be seen as a case study. He also mentioned doctors as an example, he said that examining and treating a sick person could be seen as a case study (since the symptoms are tied to one person).
Most interesting was when Leif said that a case study is when observing an object/a phenomena that already exists. The object or phenomena that you're observing isn't created by your study, and that defines the case study. You want to understand an event, a patient, a criminal etc. to see why things happen as they do. You do not create methods in order to find new data is my understanding of this, but instead you analyze data from previous, similar cases in order to further understand a specific phenomena. Like Haibo said in his lecture, you should put more time and effort into defining the actual problem instead of designing methods for solving it (since you don't know what you're actually solving if you don't know what problem you've got).
Another thing we discussed, which I agree with, is the importance of researchers with different academic backgrounds in a case study. It is easy to get caught up in a certain way of thinking if your drilled like that. Take us engineers as an example, it's to always think in terms of right and wrong, black and white since that is our background (lots of math, I know). But that way of approaching a problem isn't always plausible, and even if you think that you've solved the problem you still have to convince other people (with different kinds of backgrounds) that your solution is "the right one".
It was a bit confusing, the definition of a case study, but I still think I got a little bit wiser in the field of case studies.
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