Case Study Research in Health Professions Education

In health professions education and the sciences, case-based teaching strategies—through which instruction and learning occur through discourse around specific, contextualized cases—are the norm. Case-based reports, in their detailed reporting of symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up of patients, are also contextualized, and have facilitated new disease recognition and effects of treatments. Both case-based teaching and case-based medical reports provide a useful format for discussing complex symptoms or patients and ethical challenges in context. Likewise, case study research—a qualitative research strategy that investigators within health professions education may apply—represents an effective methodology for examining a phenomenon within its real-life context. While case study research has sometimes been faulted for its lack of representativeness and rigor, it can, when approached with focused design, systematic data collection, careful analysis, and quality control procedures, facilitate evaluation of and insights into the relationships among innovations or interventions and health care and medical education. In this way, the research yields unique information that would not be achievable using other approaches