HS 250 Medical Terminology  

Case Studies: A careful study of some social unit that attempts to determine what factors led to its success or failure.

Cases may be about an individual patient, groups of patients with the same condition, or conditions in the health professions, like the number of operational incidents at a hospital. Sometimes cases include narratives, sometime data charts are used to represent the elements of the study. Many times the studies relate directly to individual or group cases, other times a phenomonon is studied under specific conditions, for example, the impact of a new computer system on record keeping practices.

Narrative Repesetation of Patient Treament

Graphic representation of operations  incidents and the areas where they occured.

What a case study is, and why they are good for you.

Like all research methods case studies address a question, such as: What lifestyle behaviors lead to certain illnesses? What medications work best? What are the impacts of stress on the performance of health professionals?

In a case study, the aspects of an individual’s life are closely examined to see how conditions in their life relates to the topic or question being studied (including any groups they may belong to, social, ethnic, geographic, etc.). The case study always provides information about individual experience, but sometimes knowledge of this experience may be gathered from sets of subjects, (like holding small focus groups, or interviewing as many people as you can in a rural Illinois county).

Cases studies often contain quantitative information, such as repeated measures of an individuals blood pressure and BMI over time, but they usually have some major qualitative aspect to them: a survey, interview, focus group, subject journal, or other observation about the person’s behaviors.

Studying these types of issues can inform a professional field in ways that can be lost in experimental research. For example the case study may tell us more about why people overeat, because they look more closely at what a person is actually doing (and thinking and feeling). The downside is that the results can be very subjective because the information comes from the individual subject, or researchers tied very closely to the case.

The intent is to generalize individual observations to a larger group or phenomenon. Low income people may have less access to insurance, so they may have more health problems. The hope is that learning gained from studying one or several individual cases can be generalized to many others.