importance of community case study

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• Front Public Health

Community Case Study Article Type: Criteria for Submission and Peer Review

Matthew lee smith.

1 Department of Health Promotion and Behavior, College of Public Health, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

2 Department of Health Promotion and Community Health Sciences, Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health, College Station, TX, USA

Sue E. Levkoff

3 College of Social Work, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

Marcia G. Ory

The importance of case studies in public health education and promotion.

Health programs and practices are often conceived and delivered by community-based practitioners to address specific community health education and promotion needs ( 1 ). Although, initially untested, such programs can provide important lessons for researchers and practitioners, alike. Given the growing emphasis on community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches ( 2 ), it is especially important for researchers to build upon findings from CBPR studies, which can contribute to the development of evidence-based programs and practices for widespread dissemination ( 3 ).

While a community case study can take many forms ( 4 , 5 ), we are defining it as a description of, and reflection upon, a program or practice geared toward improving the health and functioning of a targeted population. We utilize the term “community” in contrast to “clinical” studies, but it is important to note that a community can be defined in terms of geographic boundaries as well as demographic characteristics, common settings, and/or affiliations.

Typically, a community case study documents a local experience about delivering services to meet an identified need. Community-based studies often rely on community engagement principles, which are not typically incorporated in the more traditional science-based approach to evidence-based program development (e.g., CBPR, action research, and community-engaged research). The community case study that documents early experiences can contribute to programmatic development as well as to the future development of evidence-based practice. This has been referred to as the “practice to science” approach to the development of evidence-based practices ( 6 ). The community case study can also represent activities at later development stages, for example, documenting the experience of implementing an evidence-based program or practice in a different context (e.g., different culture, different population, and different setting) from that in which it was first developed [“from science to practice” ( 6 )]. The lessons learned from such community case studies are essential for adaptation, replication, and eventual widespread dissemination and sustainability of innovations across a wide range of settings and populations.

Although case studies are a recognized form of research ( 5 ), the criteria for evaluating the quality of such efforts necessarily differs from empirical research articles where there is less attention to the local experience and context in which the intervention occurs, and more emphasis is given to the use of standardized research designs, measures, and analyses.

Key Components of a Community Case Study

Under this article type, Frontiers in Public Health Education and Promotion will accept a broad spectrum of manuscripts that describe interventions, including programs and services, which promote public health education, practice, research, and/or policy. Such public health interventions can be implemented at the behavioral, organizational, community, environmental, and/or policy level(s). Articles require a description of the nature of the problem being addressed and rationale for the proposed intervention, the context (setting and population) in which the intervention is being implemented, and sufficient detail to allow replication of key programmatic elements. Reflections about public health impact as well as what works and what does not work should be highlighted. Additionally, submissions will require a discussion section that shares practical implications, lessons learned for future applications, and acknowledgment of any conceptual or methodological constraints. Articles should not exceed 5,000 words and include a maximum of five tables/graphs. Evaluation criteria for this article type are outlined below:

We recommend that community case study article submissions address the following issues (if relevant).

• □ What is the problem? Whom does it affect?
• □ What are the gaps about what is known or done currently?
• □ What is the setting? Who are the key stakeholders? Who is the target population or participants?
• □ With whom did you work or collaborate? Are there any unique characteristics of the team who worked to implement the solution?
• □ What is the solution described by this community case study?
• □ Is this solution innovative/novel in terms of content, format, and/or delivery? If yes, why?
• □ What are the essential elements of the solution? Could this community case study be replicated? Include sufficient detail that the reader would know if replication would be feasible in his/her own context.
• □ What are the barriers and facilitators to the development, implementation, and/or dissemination of the intervention?
• □ What are the major successes of the solution? What are the promising results to date? Include data and/or evaluation results, if available.
• □ How does this improve public health education, practice, research, and/or policy? What are the broader implications of this work?
• □ Recommendations for those who want to replicate this in other settings, populations, or over time.

Criteria for Review (Template for Review Editors to Complete for Each Manuscript)

Indicate what the community case study describes (check all that apply)

• __an education effort
• __a health promotion program
• __a health promotion service
• __an environmental change taking place in the community
• __a technological change taking place in the community
• __a policy change taking place in the community
• __a community partnership
• __others. Please specify: _____________________
• __none of the above (i.e., inappropriately categorized for submission as a community case study article).

Indicate the target audience for the case study (check all that apply)

• __educators
• __community professionals
• __health-care professionals
• __lay public
• __policy makers
• __other. Please specify: _____________________

Mandatory Sections and Associated Criteria

A community case study article has the following mandatory sections: abstract, introduction, background and rationale, description of the case, methodological aspects (including targeted population and setting), discussion, and lessons learned/recommendations. Are all sections present?

• Is the abstract written in a clear and comprehensive way?
• Does the abstract reflect major conclusions articulated in the case study?

Introduction

• Does the introduction present the problem in an appropriate context?
• Other comments on introduction.

Background and Rationale

• Is the intent of the case study adequately described?
• Is a justification made for the innovation/novelty of proposed case in content, format, and/or delivery?
• Are the questions asked by the case study most essential to the success of the initiative?
• Other comments on background and rationale.

Essential Elements of the Intervention

• Is the intervention adequately described (e.g., development, previous findings if any, components, and format/design)?
• Is the intervention described in sufficient detail to understand the essential elements?
• Are the implementation procedures adequately described (e.g., how is the intervention being implemented in a particular setting, population, and/or partnerships; are any adaptations needed from prior work)?
• Are the target setting(s) and population(s) adequately described so that context for the case study is clearly understood?
• Is this a single community or multiple community study?
• Is there an overall conceptual model or framework for understanding the importance of the problem and selection of intervention elements?
• Is it clear whether the emphasis is on furthering knowledge about the process and/or outcome of the case study? If focus is on process, is there attention to key elements of implementation such as reach, reproducibility, scalability, or sustainability? If on outcomes, are the metrics of success (outcome indicators) clearly articulated?
• Is the generalizability of findings/lessons learned addressed?
• Other comments on methods.
• Are findings/lessons learned accurately reported from data presented?
• Is the level of detail of the results appropriate (too much, too little, or about right)?
• Is any essential information missing?
• Other comments on results.
• Are the reported findings/lessons learned summarized briefly and described within the context of what is currently known about the public health issue(s) or problem(s) being addressed?
• Does the article conclude with practical recommendations for others who might replicate this intervention/program (or similar interventions/programs)?
• Does the article conclude with applied recommendations for those in the field who might deliver this intervention/program (or similar interventions/programs) in their communities/settings?
• Does the case study contribute concrete recommendations for delivering and/or improving the intervention for future applications (directed toward educators, researchers, or practitioners, as appropriate)?
• Does the article address any conceptual or methodological limitations for future implementation, dissemination, and sustainability?
• Other comments on discussion.
• Are the conclusions justified?
• Overall, does the article contribute to building evidence-based practice and/or policy?
• Is prior work, if any, properly and fully cited?

Article Length

• A case study article should not exceed 5,000 words. Should any part of the article be shortened? If yes, please specify which part should be shortened.
• A case study article should not include more than five tables/figures. If there are more tables/figures included, please specify if you believe tables can be combined, condensed, or eliminated.

Language and Grammar

• Are the language and grammar correct?
• Should the paper be sent to an expert in English language and scientific writing?

Other Comments

• Please add any further comments you have regarding this manuscript.

Reviewer Ratings

• Significance of issue being addressed by the case study: scored out of a maximum of 10 points
• Description of essential elements of the case study: scored out of a maximum of 10 points
• Appropriateness of the context (population and setting) in addressing the public health issue/problem described in the case study: scored out of a maximum of 10 points
• Sufficient conceptual and methodological detail describing why and how the intervention was implemented: scored out of a maximum of 10 points
• Reflections on what worked and did not work in the design, implementation, and/or dissemination of the program: scored out of a maximum of 10 points
• Quality of the writing: scored out of a maximum of 10 points
• Quality of the figure(s) and table(s): scored out of a maximum of 10 points
• Significance of the findings/lessons learned: scored out of a maximum of 10 points

Author Contributions

All authors were integral in formulating and drafting the manuscript and associated criteria.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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5 Benefits of Learning Through the Case Study Method

• 28 Nov 2023

While several factors make HBS Online unique —including a global Community and real-world outcomes —active learning through the case study method rises to the top.

In a 2023 City Square Associates survey, 74 percent of HBS Online learners who also took a course from another provider said HBS Online’s case method and real-world examples were better by comparison.

Here’s a primer on the case method, five benefits you could gain, and how to experience it for yourself.

Access your free e-book today.

What Is the Harvard Business School Case Study Method?

The case study method , or case method , is a learning technique in which you’re presented with a real-world business challenge and asked how you’d solve it. After working through it yourself and with peers, you’re told how the scenario played out.

HBS pioneered the case method in 1922. Shortly before, in 1921, the first case was written.

“How do you go into an ambiguous situation and get to the bottom of it?” says HBS Professor Jan Rivkin, former senior associate dean and chair of HBS's master of business administration (MBA) program, in a video about the case method . “That skill—the skill of figuring out a course of inquiry to choose a course of action—that skill is as relevant today as it was in 1921.”

Originally developed for the in-person MBA classroom, HBS Online adapted the case method into an engaging, interactive online learning experience in 2014.

In HBS Online courses , you learn about each case from the business professional who experienced it. After reviewing their videos, you’re prompted to take their perspective and explain how you’d handle their situation.

You then get to read peers’ responses, “star” them, and comment to further the discussion. Afterward, you learn how the professional handled it and their key takeaways.

Learn more about HBS Online's approach to the case method in the video below, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more.

HBS Online’s adaptation of the case method incorporates the famed HBS “cold call,” in which you’re called on at random to make a decision without time to prepare.

“Learning came to life!” said Sheneka Balogun , chief administration officer and chief of staff at LeMoyne-Owen College, of her experience taking the Credential of Readiness (CORe) program . “The videos from the professors, the interactive cold calls where you were randomly selected to participate, and the case studies that enhanced and often captured the essence of objectives and learning goals were all embedded in each module. This made learning fun, engaging, and student-friendly.”

If you’re considering taking a course that leverages the case study method, here are five benefits you could experience.

5 Benefits of Learning Through Case Studies

1. take new perspectives.

The case method prompts you to consider a scenario from another person’s perspective. To work through the situation and come up with a solution, you must consider their circumstances, limitations, risk tolerance, stakeholders, resources, and potential consequences to assess how to respond.

Taking on new perspectives not only can help you navigate your own challenges but also others’. Putting yourself in someone else’s situation to understand their motivations and needs can go a long way when collaborating with stakeholders.

2. Hone Your Decision-Making Skills

Another skill you can build is the ability to make decisions effectively . The case study method forces you to use limited information to decide how to handle a problem—just like in the real world.

Throughout your career, you’ll need to make difficult decisions with incomplete or imperfect information—and sometimes, you won’t feel qualified to do so. Learning through the case method allows you to practice this skill in a low-stakes environment. When facing a real challenge, you’ll be better prepared to think quickly, collaborate with others, and present and defend your solution.

3. Become More Open-Minded

As you collaborate with peers on responses, it becomes clear that not everyone solves problems the same way. Exposing yourself to various approaches and perspectives can help you become a more open-minded professional.

When you’re part of a diverse group of learners from around the world, your experiences, cultures, and backgrounds contribute to a range of opinions on each case.

On the HBS Online course platform, you’re prompted to view and comment on others’ responses, and discussion is encouraged. This practice of considering others’ perspectives can make you more receptive in your career.

“You’d be surprised at how much you can learn from your peers,” said Ratnaditya Jonnalagadda , a software engineer who took CORe.

In addition to interacting with peers in the course platform, Jonnalagadda was part of the HBS Online Community , where he networked with other professionals and continued discussions sparked by course content.

“You get to understand your peers better, and students share examples of businesses implementing a concept from a module you just learned,” Jonnalagadda said. “It’s a very good way to cement the concepts in one's mind.”

4. Enhance Your Curiosity

One byproduct of taking on different perspectives is that it enables you to picture yourself in various roles, industries, and business functions.

“Each case offers an opportunity for students to see what resonates with them, what excites them, what bores them, which role they could imagine inhabiting in their careers,” says former HBS Dean Nitin Nohria in the Harvard Business Review . “Cases stimulate curiosity about the range of opportunities in the world and the many ways that students can make a difference as leaders.”

Through the case method, you can “try on” roles you may not have considered and feel more prepared to change or advance your career .

5. Build Your Self-Confidence

Finally, learning through the case study method can build your confidence. Each time you assume a business leader’s perspective, aim to solve a new challenge, and express and defend your opinions and decisions to peers, you prepare to do the same in your career.

According to a 2022 City Square Associates survey , 84 percent of HBS Online learners report feeling more confident making business decisions after taking a course.

“Self-confidence is difficult to teach or coach, but the case study method seems to instill it in people,” Nohria says in the Harvard Business Review . “There may well be other ways of learning these meta-skills, such as the repeated experience gained through practice or guidance from a gifted coach. However, under the direction of a masterful teacher, the case method can engage students and help them develop powerful meta-skills like no other form of teaching.”

How to Experience the Case Study Method

If the case method seems like a good fit for your learning style, experience it for yourself by taking an HBS Online course. Offerings span eight subject areas, including:

• Business essentials
• Leadership and management
• Entrepreneurship and innovation
• Digital transformation
• Finance and accounting
• Business in society

No matter which course or credential program you choose, you’ll examine case studies from real business professionals, work through their challenges alongside peers, and gain valuable insights to apply to your career.

Are you interested in discovering how HBS Online can help advance your career? Explore our course catalog and download our free guide —complete with interactive workbook sections—to determine if online learning is right for you and which course to take.

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Methodology

• What Is a Case Study? | Definition, Examples & Methods

What Is a Case Study? | Definition, Examples & Methods

Published on May 8, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on November 20, 2023.

A case study is a detailed study of a specific subject, such as a person, group, place, event, organization, or phenomenon. Case studies are commonly used in social, educational, clinical, and business research.

A case study research design usually involves qualitative methods , but quantitative methods are sometimes also used. Case studies are good for describing , comparing, evaluating and understanding different aspects of a research problem .

Table of contents

When to do a case study, step 1: select a case, step 2: build a theoretical framework, step 3: collect your data, step 4: describe and analyze the case, other interesting articles.

A case study is an appropriate research design when you want to gain concrete, contextual, in-depth knowledge about a specific real-world subject. It allows you to explore the key characteristics, meanings, and implications of the case.

Case studies are often a good choice in a thesis or dissertation . They keep your project focused and manageable when you don’t have the time or resources to do large-scale research.

You might use just one complex case study where you explore a single subject in depth, or conduct multiple case studies to compare and illuminate different aspects of your research problem.

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Once you have developed your problem statement and research questions , you should be ready to choose the specific case that you want to focus on. A good case study should have the potential to:

• Provide new or unexpected insights into the subject
• Challenge or complicate existing assumptions and theories
• Propose practical courses of action to resolve a problem
• Open up new directions for future research

TipIf your research is more practical in nature and aims to simultaneously investigate an issue as you solve it, consider conducting action research instead.

Unlike quantitative or experimental research , a strong case study does not require a random or representative sample. In fact, case studies often deliberately focus on unusual, neglected, or outlying cases which may shed new light on the research problem.

Example of an outlying case studyIn the 1960s the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania was discovered to have extremely low rates of heart disease compared to the US average. It became an important case study for understanding previously neglected causes of heart disease.

However, you can also choose a more common or representative case to exemplify a particular category, experience or phenomenon.

Example of a representative case studyIn the 1920s, two sociologists used Muncie, Indiana as a case study of a typical American city that supposedly exemplified the changing culture of the US at the time.

While case studies focus more on concrete details than general theories, they should usually have some connection with theory in the field. This way the case study is not just an isolated description, but is integrated into existing knowledge about the topic. It might aim to:

• Exemplify a theory by showing how it explains the case under investigation
• Expand on a theory by uncovering new concepts and ideas that need to be incorporated
• Challenge a theory by exploring an outlier case that doesn’t fit with established assumptions

To ensure that your analysis of the case has a solid academic grounding, you should conduct a literature review of sources related to the topic and develop a theoretical framework . This means identifying key concepts and theories to guide your analysis and interpretation.

There are many different research methods you can use to collect data on your subject. Case studies tend to focus on qualitative data using methods such as interviews , observations , and analysis of primary and secondary sources (e.g., newspaper articles, photographs, official records). Sometimes a case study will also collect quantitative data.

Example of a mixed methods case studyFor a case study of a wind farm development in a rural area, you could collect quantitative data on employment rates and business revenue, collect qualitative data on local people’s perceptions and experiences, and analyze local and national media coverage of the development.

The aim is to gain as thorough an understanding as possible of the case and its context.

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In writing up the case study, you need to bring together all the relevant aspects to give as complete a picture as possible of the subject.

How you report your findings depends on the type of research you are doing. Some case studies are structured like a standard scientific paper or thesis , with separate sections or chapters for the methods , results and discussion .

Others are written in a more narrative style, aiming to explore the case from various angles and analyze its meanings and implications (for example, by using textual analysis or discourse analysis ).

In all cases, though, make sure to give contextual details about the case, connect it back to the literature and theory, and discuss how it fits into wider patterns or debates.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Ecological validity

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

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Home » Case Study – Methods, Examples and Guide

Case Study – Methods, Examples and Guide

Table of Contents

A case study is a research method that involves an in-depth examination and analysis of a particular phenomenon or case, such as an individual, organization, community, event, or situation.

It is a qualitative research approach that aims to provide a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the case being studied. Case studies typically involve multiple sources of data, including interviews, observations, documents, and artifacts, which are analyzed using various techniques, such as content analysis, thematic analysis, and grounded theory. The findings of a case study are often used to develop theories, inform policy or practice, or generate new research questions.

Types of Case Study

Types and Methods of Case Study are as follows:

Single-Case Study

A single-case study is an in-depth analysis of a single case. This type of case study is useful when the researcher wants to understand a specific phenomenon in detail.

For Example , A researcher might conduct a single-case study on a particular individual to understand their experiences with a particular health condition or a specific organization to explore their management practices. The researcher collects data from multiple sources, such as interviews, observations, and documents, and uses various techniques to analyze the data, such as content analysis or thematic analysis. The findings of a single-case study are often used to generate new research questions, develop theories, or inform policy or practice.

Multiple-Case Study

A multiple-case study involves the analysis of several cases that are similar in nature. This type of case study is useful when the researcher wants to identify similarities and differences between the cases.

For Example, a researcher might conduct a multiple-case study on several companies to explore the factors that contribute to their success or failure. The researcher collects data from each case, compares and contrasts the findings, and uses various techniques to analyze the data, such as comparative analysis or pattern-matching. The findings of a multiple-case study can be used to develop theories, inform policy or practice, or generate new research questions.

Exploratory Case Study

An exploratory case study is used to explore a new or understudied phenomenon. This type of case study is useful when the researcher wants to generate hypotheses or theories about the phenomenon.

For Example, a researcher might conduct an exploratory case study on a new technology to understand its potential impact on society. The researcher collects data from multiple sources, such as interviews, observations, and documents, and uses various techniques to analyze the data, such as grounded theory or content analysis. The findings of an exploratory case study can be used to generate new research questions, develop theories, or inform policy or practice.

Descriptive Case Study

A descriptive case study is used to describe a particular phenomenon in detail. This type of case study is useful when the researcher wants to provide a comprehensive account of the phenomenon.

For Example, a researcher might conduct a descriptive case study on a particular community to understand its social and economic characteristics. The researcher collects data from multiple sources, such as interviews, observations, and documents, and uses various techniques to analyze the data, such as content analysis or thematic analysis. The findings of a descriptive case study can be used to inform policy or practice or generate new research questions.

Instrumental Case Study

An instrumental case study is used to understand a particular phenomenon that is instrumental in achieving a particular goal. This type of case study is useful when the researcher wants to understand the role of the phenomenon in achieving the goal.

For Example, a researcher might conduct an instrumental case study on a particular policy to understand its impact on achieving a particular goal, such as reducing poverty. The researcher collects data from multiple sources, such as interviews, observations, and documents, and uses various techniques to analyze the data, such as content analysis or thematic analysis. The findings of an instrumental case study can be used to inform policy or practice or generate new research questions.

Case Study Data Collection Methods

Here are some common data collection methods for case studies:

Interviews involve asking questions to individuals who have knowledge or experience relevant to the case study. Interviews can be structured (where the same questions are asked to all participants) or unstructured (where the interviewer follows up on the responses with further questions). Interviews can be conducted in person, over the phone, or through video conferencing.

Observations

Observations involve watching and recording the behavior and activities of individuals or groups relevant to the case study. Observations can be participant (where the researcher actively participates in the activities) or non-participant (where the researcher observes from a distance). Observations can be recorded using notes, audio or video recordings, or photographs.

Documents can be used as a source of information for case studies. Documents can include reports, memos, emails, letters, and other written materials related to the case study. Documents can be collected from the case study participants or from public sources.

Surveys involve asking a set of questions to a sample of individuals relevant to the case study. Surveys can be administered in person, over the phone, through mail or email, or online. Surveys can be used to gather information on attitudes, opinions, or behaviors related to the case study.

Artifacts are physical objects relevant to the case study. Artifacts can include tools, equipment, products, or other objects that provide insights into the case study phenomenon.

How to conduct Case Study Research

Conducting a case study research involves several steps that need to be followed to ensure the quality and rigor of the study. Here are the steps to conduct case study research:

• Define the research questions: The first step in conducting a case study research is to define the research questions. The research questions should be specific, measurable, and relevant to the case study phenomenon under investigation.
• Select the case: The next step is to select the case or cases to be studied. The case should be relevant to the research questions and should provide rich and diverse data that can be used to answer the research questions.
• Collect data: Data can be collected using various methods, such as interviews, observations, documents, surveys, and artifacts. The data collection method should be selected based on the research questions and the nature of the case study phenomenon.
• Analyze the data: The data collected from the case study should be analyzed using various techniques, such as content analysis, thematic analysis, or grounded theory. The analysis should be guided by the research questions and should aim to provide insights and conclusions relevant to the research questions.
• Draw conclusions: The conclusions drawn from the case study should be based on the data analysis and should be relevant to the research questions. The conclusions should be supported by evidence and should be clearly stated.
• Validate the findings: The findings of the case study should be validated by reviewing the data and the analysis with participants or other experts in the field. This helps to ensure the validity and reliability of the findings.
• Write the report: The final step is to write the report of the case study research. The report should provide a clear description of the case study phenomenon, the research questions, the data collection methods, the data analysis, the findings, and the conclusions. The report should be written in a clear and concise manner and should follow the guidelines for academic writing.

Examples of Case Study

Here are some examples of case study research:

• The Hawthorne Studies : Conducted between 1924 and 1932, the Hawthorne Studies were a series of case studies conducted by Elton Mayo and his colleagues to examine the impact of work environment on employee productivity. The studies were conducted at the Hawthorne Works plant of the Western Electric Company in Chicago and included interviews, observations, and experiments.
• The Stanford Prison Experiment: Conducted in 1971, the Stanford Prison Experiment was a case study conducted by Philip Zimbardo to examine the psychological effects of power and authority. The study involved simulating a prison environment and assigning participants to the role of guards or prisoners. The study was controversial due to the ethical issues it raised.
• The Challenger Disaster: The Challenger Disaster was a case study conducted to examine the causes of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986. The study included interviews, observations, and analysis of data to identify the technical, organizational, and cultural factors that contributed to the disaster.
• The Enron Scandal: The Enron Scandal was a case study conducted to examine the causes of the Enron Corporation’s bankruptcy in 2001. The study included interviews, analysis of financial data, and review of documents to identify the accounting practices, corporate culture, and ethical issues that led to the company’s downfall.
• The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster : The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster was a case study conducted to examine the causes of the nuclear accident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in 2011. The study included interviews, analysis of data, and review of documents to identify the technical, organizational, and cultural factors that contributed to the disaster.

Application of Case Study

Case studies have a wide range of applications across various fields and industries. Here are some examples:

Business and Management

Case studies are widely used in business and management to examine real-life situations and develop problem-solving skills. Case studies can help students and professionals to develop a deep understanding of business concepts, theories, and best practices.

Case studies are used in healthcare to examine patient care, treatment options, and outcomes. Case studies can help healthcare professionals to develop critical thinking skills, diagnose complex medical conditions, and develop effective treatment plans.

Case studies are used in education to examine teaching and learning practices. Case studies can help educators to develop effective teaching strategies, evaluate student progress, and identify areas for improvement.

Social Sciences

Case studies are widely used in social sciences to examine human behavior, social phenomena, and cultural practices. Case studies can help researchers to develop theories, test hypotheses, and gain insights into complex social issues.

Law and Ethics

Case studies are used in law and ethics to examine legal and ethical dilemmas. Case studies can help lawyers, policymakers, and ethical professionals to develop critical thinking skills, analyze complex cases, and make informed decisions.

Purpose of Case Study

The purpose of a case study is to provide a detailed analysis of a specific phenomenon, issue, or problem in its real-life context. A case study is a qualitative research method that involves the in-depth exploration and analysis of a particular case, which can be an individual, group, organization, event, or community.

The primary purpose of a case study is to generate a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the case, including its history, context, and dynamics. Case studies can help researchers to identify and examine the underlying factors, processes, and mechanisms that contribute to the case and its outcomes. This can help to develop a more accurate and detailed understanding of the case, which can inform future research, practice, or policy.

Case studies can also serve other purposes, including:

• Illustrating a theory or concept: Case studies can be used to illustrate and explain theoretical concepts and frameworks, providing concrete examples of how they can be applied in real-life situations.
• Developing hypotheses: Case studies can help to generate hypotheses about the causal relationships between different factors and outcomes, which can be tested through further research.
• Providing insight into complex issues: Case studies can provide insights into complex and multifaceted issues, which may be difficult to understand through other research methods.
• Informing practice or policy: Case studies can be used to inform practice or policy by identifying best practices, lessons learned, or areas for improvement.

Advantages of Case Study Research

There are several advantages of case study research, including:

• In-depth exploration: Case study research allows for a detailed exploration and analysis of a specific phenomenon, issue, or problem in its real-life context. This can provide a comprehensive understanding of the case and its dynamics, which may not be possible through other research methods.
• Rich data: Case study research can generate rich and detailed data, including qualitative data such as interviews, observations, and documents. This can provide a nuanced understanding of the case and its complexity.
• Holistic perspective: Case study research allows for a holistic perspective of the case, taking into account the various factors, processes, and mechanisms that contribute to the case and its outcomes. This can help to develop a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of the case.
• Theory development: Case study research can help to develop and refine theories and concepts by providing empirical evidence and concrete examples of how they can be applied in real-life situations.
• Practical application: Case study research can inform practice or policy by identifying best practices, lessons learned, or areas for improvement.
• Contextualization: Case study research takes into account the specific context in which the case is situated, which can help to understand how the case is influenced by the social, cultural, and historical factors of its environment.

Limitations of Case Study Research

There are several limitations of case study research, including:

• Limited generalizability : Case studies are typically focused on a single case or a small number of cases, which limits the generalizability of the findings. The unique characteristics of the case may not be applicable to other contexts or populations, which may limit the external validity of the research.
• Biased sampling: Case studies may rely on purposive or convenience sampling, which can introduce bias into the sample selection process. This may limit the representativeness of the sample and the generalizability of the findings.
• Subjectivity: Case studies rely on the interpretation of the researcher, which can introduce subjectivity into the analysis. The researcher’s own biases, assumptions, and perspectives may influence the findings, which may limit the objectivity of the research.
• Limited control: Case studies are typically conducted in naturalistic settings, which limits the control that the researcher has over the environment and the variables being studied. This may limit the ability to establish causal relationships between variables.
• Time-consuming: Case studies can be time-consuming to conduct, as they typically involve a detailed exploration and analysis of a specific case. This may limit the feasibility of conducting multiple case studies or conducting case studies in a timely manner.
• Resource-intensive: Case studies may require significant resources, including time, funding, and expertise. This may limit the ability of researchers to conduct case studies in resource-constrained settings.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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COMMUNITY CASE STUDY article

Frameworks for community impact - community case study.

• Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital, St. Johnbury, VT, United States

The Affordable Care Act of 2008 placed specific community health needs assessment and community benefit reporting requirements on US not-for-profit hospitals. The requirements are straightforward, but come with no expectation for synergy between the needs assessment and the community benefit spending, no direction on how to design systems to improve community health, and with surprisingly little accountability for improving health outcomes. With the help of diverse community partners, one Critical Access hospital in rural Vermont has successfully linked the needs assessment with community benefit dollars to address upstream contributors of health. In 2014, Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital lead the creation of NEK Prosper: Caledonia and Southern Essex Accountable Health Community with a mission to tackle poverty as the ultimate root cause of poor health in the region. This article outlines how a hospital community health needs assessment ignited a change in how community partners worked together, aligned organizational strategies, and overcame industry jargon barriers to create regional system change to improve health. And how that same hospital has used community benefit dollars to accelerate action at the community level.

Introduction

This article outlines how Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital (NVRH) is able to use its community health needs assessment as both a catalyst to change how community partners work together, and to inform how best to spend the hospital community benefit dollars to impact community health.

NVRH is a 25 bed Critical Access Hospital in northern Vermont. The 2012 NVRH Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) identified poverty as one of the top health priority areas. Poverty, and the symptoms of poverty like inadequate access to healthcare, healthy food, transportation, and education, is a well-documented root cause of poor health ( 1 , 2 ). Low income adults are more likely to suffer difficulties in their daily lives due to chronic illness, while children living in poverty are often left with risk factors that can affect their health throughout their lives ( 3 ) Consequently, tackling poverty in the hospital service area became a priority issue for NVRH and its leaders, particularly the CEO. As part of the 2012 CHNA implementation plan, NVRH committed to convene community leaders to address the issue of poverty as the upstream, systemic driver of poor health and health inequity.

Convened by invitation of NVRH, the leaders of the regional Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) and home health agency, designated mental health agency, community action agency, council on aging, and designated regional housing organization began meeting regularly at the hospital. As they talked about what they each could do to address poverty and researched how they could work better together in a strategic and collaborative way, two models emerged: The Accountable Health Community (AHC) and collective impact (CI) models.

AHC is an emerging model gaining popularity across the US. An AHC is responsible for the health and well-being of everyone who lives in a geographic region. The AHC model recognizes that the health of a population is determined by multiple factors: healthcare, environment, socio-economic status, and individual behaviors. ( 4 ) The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) says the AHC model “addresses a critical gap between clinical care and community services in the current health care delivery system” ( 5 ).

The Prevention Institute has embraced the AHC model as a “promising vehicle toward reaching the full potential of the Triple Aim.” The Prevention Institute has identified nine core elements of the AHC model: multi-sectoral partnership; integrator organization; governance; data; strategy and implementation; community engagement; communications; and sustainable financing ( 6 ).

The AHC model outlines one structure to foster collaboration ( 7 ). True collaboration requires multi-sector partners work well-together ( 8 ). This is where the collective impact model can help.

CI has been articulated as a method for solving large scale social problems by “a systemic approach to social impact that focuses on the relationships between organizations and the progress toward shared objectives.” Successful CI initiatives have five conditions that together produce true alignment and lead to powerful results: a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support organizations ( 9 ).

NVRH is located in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, a region known for its rugged rural landscape and independent and spirited people. The primary service area for NVRH is Caledonia and southern Essex counties, with just under 30,000 people. Population density in Caledonia County is 48.1 persons per square mile and 9.5 persons per square mile in Essex County ( 10 ). Both counties are bordered by the Connecticut River and New Hampshire to the east.

The 25 bed hospital is the largest employer in the region, with over 600 employees. The hospital operates four rural health clinics and six specialty medical offices. A different entity operates three FQHC's and home health and hospice for the region. All the primary care offices in the region are recognized NCQA Patient Centered Medical Homes. Mental health services are provided by a regional designated mental health agency and many independent providers in private practice. There are several independent long-term care facilities in the area. Comprehensive cancer care services are located on the NVRH campus, but provided by the nearest (70 miles to the south) tertiary center. A private for-profit dialysis center provides services in a building owned by NVRH. Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT) for opioid addiction is provided by a private for-profit organization located down the road from NVRH. The mental health agency and several primary care offices operated by the hospital and the FQHC also provide MAT services.

NVRH has a long history and reputation for working collaboratively and embracing the idea that health happens outside the walls of the hospital. Over the decades, NVRH leadership has spearheaded the formation of prevention coalitions to address obesity and substance use, providing staff resources, meeting space, and funding for coalition initiatives. Both NVRH leadership and staff routinely works with local and state public health staff though the Vermont Department of Health on prevention and public health initiatives driven by the Vermont State Health Improvement Plan, and data like the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey and the Youth Behavior Risk Survey collected by the Health Department, as well as local Department of Health priorities.

The NVRH service area was the first of two pilot communities funded by the Vermont Blueprint for Health in 2005, and the first Integrated Medical Home and Community Health Team pilot community created under Act 71 ( 11 ). The robust and active Blueprint for Health Community Health Team continues to provide a forum for coordinated care between direct service providers from healthcare, human services, and community-based organizations.

NEK Prosper!

In 2014, NVRH lead the creation of NEK Prosper: Caledonia and Southern Essex Accountable Health Community with a mission to tackle poverty as the ultimate root cause of poor health in the region.

That initial informal group of community leaders convened by NVRH in 2014 has since added the state-wide foodbank and the regional United Way and become the leadership team. NEK Prosper has provided the forum for the leadership team decision makers come together to strategically align their organizations, something that did not happen prior to the formation of the AHC.

The leadership team embraced the frameworks provided by the AHC and CI models. There is a formal governance and decision-making structure, shared measures for success, and intentional methods for community engagement. Basic meeting etiquette and equitable participation is ensured by reviewing standard norms of behavior, such as “listening with intent” and “address issues directly and succinctly” at each meeting. Leadership team members have adopted norms of behavior for meetings. They have all signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that outlines the mission and purpose of the AHC, specific roles and responsibilities of the leadership team members, and a process for decision-making. Stewardship has been an important guiding principle for all members; the advice to “wear two hats – those of your organization and this partnership” is included in the norms of behavior.

Today, the AHC includes members from healthcare, human services, housing, transportation, mental health, community action, charitable food, funders, school districts, domestic violence agency, youth services, economic development and regional planning, banks/financial organizations, town government, restorative justice, and State agencies including Vermont Department of Health and Vermont Department of Human Services ( Figure 1 ). All NEK Prosper members sign a culture statement that encourages innovative thinking, sharing of resources, and working relationships based on trust and respect. Rather than creating another needs assessment, NEK Prosper officially adopted the hospital community health needs assessment (CHNA) as the official community needs assessment of the AHC in 2016.

Figure 1 . Member Organizations for NEK Prosper.

The name NEK Prosper: Caledonia and Southern Essex Accountable Health Community was officially adopted in 2018. NVRH serves as the backbone organization for NEK Prosper.

Workgroups called Collaborative Action Networks (CANs) include community member participation and focus on each of NEK Prosper's five outcome areas: our community will be well–nourished, well-housed, physically healthy, mentally healthy, and financially secure. NEK Prosper and the CANs use Results Based Accountability™ to measure impact on health.

Programmatic Elements

The purpose of the NVRH community health needs assessment is to identify initiatives at the individual, community, environmental, and policy level, as well as programs and services that meet the hospital's mission to improve the health of people in the communities it serves. When it came time for NVRH to complete the 2018 CHNA, the leading criterion for setting community health priorities was the ability to work within the NEK Prosper framework to best capitalize on existing community resources and assets.

The 2018 CHNA built on the foundation of the previous assessments. New for 2018, the CHNA used the framework of NEK Prosper. Additionally, the CHNA was advised by the data compiled and the community engagement work already done by NEK Prosper, and adopted the mission of the NEK Prosper to reduce poverty in the region.

The CHNA data collection identified low-income families, and older adults as the most vulnerable population. The CHNA validated the objectives of NEK Prosper that communities will be financially secure, physically healthy, mentally healthy, well-nourished, and well-housed. Consequently, the NVRH 2018 CHNA proposed that over the next three years, NVRH will implement initiatives, and programs and services that work to meet these five objectives to improve health in the community, while intentionally addressing the underlying causes of health disparities .

Like NEK Prosper, the 2018 NVRH CHNA Implementation Plan and Evaluation use Results Based Accountability™ (RBA) to measure impact, evaluate initiatives, and drive action and change. RBA provides a step by step process to get results. RBA defines both population level (whether we have achieved goals for a defined population) and performance level (how well a program or service is working) measures. ( 12 ).

In fiscal year 2019, with an intentional effort to use community benefit dollars to accelerate action, the hospital budgeted $93,000 from operations to fund initiatives of the five CANs of NEK Prosper. The initiatives and dollar amounts are outlined in the CHNA Implementation Plan. For that first year, not all the CANs had initiatives ready for funding. The same amounts were budgeted for fiscal year 2020.

The CANs are data driven and use a common template and tools to decide which community strategies to implement. The Well-Nourished CAN launched the Food Hero Social Marketing Campaign in May 2019. Food Hero is a program from Oregon State University Extension Service with funding from SNAP-ED. The goal of the program is to increase fruit and vegetable consumption by creating and disseminating low cost, easy to prepare, and healthy recipes ( 13 ).

NVRH Community Benefit dollars purchased re-useable grocery bags with the Food Hero and NVRH logo. The bags are distributed at events sponsored by NVRH and the partner organizations of the Well-Nourished CAN. Large Food Hero banners attract attention at local events. Food Hero themed placemats are used at the hospital and senior meal sites.

Using Results Based Accountability™ (RBA) principles, the Well-Nourished CAN tracks the number of sites using Food Hero materials, social media engagements, and the number of Food Hero recipes distributed to measure performance level results. The CAN will use a Food Hero qualitative evaluation tool to measure behavior change in spring 2020. The CAN uses population level indicators collected by the Vermont Department of Health (fruit and vegetable consumption and the prevalence of hypertension) to measure long term impact.

Other CAN initiatives funded by NVRH community benefit dollars are the popular smoothie bikes for use at school and community events as part of the Physically Healthy CAN's community-based campaign to increase physical activity, and stipends for fitness providers to offer free pop up fitness classes in local parks. NVRH has funded a small pilot project that pays for complimentary therapies like acupuncture for people coping with mental health issues under the direction of the Mentally Healthy CAN. Every CAN initiative is evaluated for impact by using RBA performance measures of “how much, how well, and is anyone better off.” Each CAN measures community wide impact by using population level indicators such as percentage of people getting the recommended amount of physical activity or regional rates of suicide. Impact dashboard for some of the CANs can found at the NEK Prosper website.

The partners in NEK Prosper are not stopping with community-based interventions of the CANs. Two wellness funds were created thanks to the strong culture of stewardship, and leaders focused on action to improve health by tackling poverty.

Working with local economic development and financial partners NEK Prosper members are ready to launch the NEK Prosperity Fund using a capital stacking approach to raise funds to free up almost a million dollars currently held by the regional Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) to invest in small and emerging local businesses. The purpose of the fund is to act as an investment vehicle aimed at promoting economic development by offering loans to local businesses, as well as supporting the overall well-being of the employees and customers of the business. Loans will be given to businesses that might not qualify for traditional bank loans or other loans offered by the CDFI. These more “at risk” businesses will need a high level of technical assistance to be successful. An Advisory Committee of NEK Prosper will assist the CDFI in developing general policies for mission driven funding.

The NEK Prosper leadership team has committed to raising $200,000 for a loan loss reserve fund to protect the original capital loan fund assets, and to pay for additional business support services by the experienced CDFI staff. It is expected the money will be raised quickly with investments from the hospital, other leadership team organizations, and local businesses.

In spring 2020, NEK Prosper launched the Healthy Cents Fund. The Healthy Cents Fund is available for local organizations for innovative upstream interventions or investments that will create healthy and thriving communities and positive social, economic, or environmental impact. The fund aims to accelerate the work of NEK Prosper and move the AHC closer to the five outcome areas. The value-based payment environment was key to the creation of this fund. Funding for the Healthy Cents Fund comes from Medicaid capitated payments to NVRH paid through the Vermont All Payer Model and the state-wide Accountable Care Organization. Rather than wait for potential shared savings, NVRH takes 1% off the top of the per member per month capitated payments to finance the Healthy Cents Fund, or about $58,000 annually.

Both funds require community engagement activities, and must tie directly to the five outcomes areas of NEK Prosper and the health priorities of the CHNA. Social return on investment is measured using a modified logic model table linking funded activities to short and long term social outcomes.

In a value-based payment environment, hospitals have the financial incentives to keep people well and out of the hospital and the flexibility to use hospital resources to address the social determinants of health. It is time for hospitals to put resources into prevention and the social and environmental factors that make people sick ( 1 ). Nationally, researchers and policy makers are looking for ways for hospitals and partners to combine resources in a more systemic way ( 14 , 15 ).

Hospitals already have a tool in place to identify the community needs and priorities: the CHNA. The data and community input gathered during the CHNA process provides the roadmap for where hospitals can best invest resources to make the most impact on health. The community benefit requirements of the Affordable Care Act make it possible for hospitals to get credit for their investments. Yet, few hospitals are investing in “community building” projects that address social determinants ( 2 ). Additionally, there is clear consensus that a comprehensive approach to improving health requires multisector partners working in sync. However, we are falling short of all we can do to truly improve health and well-being ( 8 ).

NVRH and the partner organizations in the region have used the promising models of collaboration of Accountable Health Community (AHC) and collective impact (CI) to align their strategies, organization resources, and funding. The models provide the structure to work collaboratively, while holding people accountable for their contributions to the goals of NEK Prosper. AHC and CI have helped create an atmosphere of trust and a process for measuring results.

Leadership from the hospital CEO and the executive directors of other community agencies was a critical component to initiating and continuing the collaboration. Stewardship and trust are two additional elements that are essential. The CI model provides a model for identifying and incorporating these elements into concrete activities.

The role of the hospital was critical to the success of NEK Prosper. Despite its small size, NVRH is a leading force in the community. Additionally, the financial contribution provided through the community benefit funds enabled concrete actions that the community might otherwise have struggled to achieve.

Lessons Learned and Tips for Success:

• Don't reinvent the wheel. Use existing models and frameworks to create a community collaborative structure the works in your community.

• Be strategic in making your list of who needs to be at the table. Include traditional health and human service partners, community-based organizations focused on social determinants, local and state government, funders, and less traditional partners like for-profit business and economic development agencies.

• Finding common ground with less traditional partners may take some time; expect communication barriers. NVRH and NEK Prosper found that banks and economic development agencies wanted the same thing – a healthy prosperous community; however, industry specific jargon made it difficult to identify common goals. Engage these partners in your work by asking for their expertise in finding financial resources for projects and measuring financial return on investment. In exchange, health and human services can offer expertise in social return on investment measures, and provide specific services and programs to improve the health and well-being for employees of these partners and for the employers and customers they work with every day.

We inherently know that we are better together, stronger together, and can accomplish more together. Using current partnership frameworks like Accountable Health Community and collective impact, hospitals can provide the data - CHNA, the funding - community benefits, and the leadership to foster a culture of stewardship to truly create and maintain healthy communities.

Conclusions

As hospitals work to improve health in their communities, they must be intentional about improving the systems and structures within their organizations and regions to support health, well-being, and equal opportunities for all.

The recipe for success includes a strong foundation built on three models: Accountable Health Community, Collective Impact, and Results Based Accountability™ to guide operations, keep community partners heading in the same strategic direction, and quantify and measure results. Adding three key ingredients: leadership, stewardship, and action to the foundational structure drives NEK Prosper toward high impact and a healthier, and potentially more prosperous, region.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.

Author's Note

This is a community case study as described by one author. The author has a unique perspective because of her involvement in the initial and ongoing operations of NEK Prosper. She is also the staff person at NVRH in charge of both the CHNA process and the community benefit reporting.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: community benefit, accountable health community, community health needs assessment, non-profit hospital, social determinansts of health

Citation: Ruggles L (2020) Frameworks for Community Impact - Community Case Study. Front. Public Health 8:197. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2020.00197

Received: 02 March 2020; Accepted: 30 April 2020; Published: 02 June 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Ruggles. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Laural Ruggles, l.ruggles@nvrh.org

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Studies in Engineering Education

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Empirical Research

The importance of community in fostering change: a qualitative case study of the rigorous research in engineering education (rree) program.

• Nicole Pitterson
• Cheryl Allendoerfer
• Ruth Streveler
• Juan Ortega-Alvarez
• communities of practice
• institutional change
• educational reform

Introduction

The US Engineering Education Research (EER) community experienced an important pivot point in the mid-2000s. The premiere journal in the field, the Journal of Engineering Education , was repositioned as a scholarly journal, that is, the research journal for engineering education ( Lohmann, 2005 ), Departments of Engineering Education began to be formed ( Benson et al., 2010 ; Haghighi, 2005 ), and the National Science Foundation began emphasizing scholarship in engineering education to “move from a focus of reform to an emphasis on research” ( Gabriele, 2005, p. 286 ) in engineering instruction. The National Academy of Engineering report, Educating the Engineer of 2020 ( 2005 ) recommended that:

Colleges and universities should endorse research in engineering education as a valued and rewarded activity for engineering faculty and should develop new standards for faculty qualifications.

Also, during this period, the Engineering Education Research Colloquies (EERC) ( The National Engineering Education Research Colloquies, 2006 ) were conducted to propose a research agenda for engineering education ( The Research Agenda for the New Discipline of Engineering Education, 2006 ).

In conjunction with this newly developed research agenda came the emergence of research centers across the United States intent on formalizing this new approach to research ( Fortenberry, 2006 ; Haghighi et al., 2008 ). These centers, while targeting different populations, had a similar objective: to promote a scholarly approach to engineering education through building and curating relationships with other institutions as well as national and international collaborators. At the same time, the National Science Foundation invested in research programs intent on engaging engineering and social science researchers ( Felder, Sheppard & Smith, 2005 ). One such program was the Rigorous Research in Engineering Education (RREE): Creating a Community of Practice (CoP) (DUE-0341127), whose primary goal was to increase the number of engineering faculty members prepared to conduct high-quality engineering education research.

Faculty of varying academic ranks and at institutions that span the breadth of categories based on the Carnegie classification participated in the RREE workshops over the course of three years. Table 1 summarizes the rank of faculty and the type of institutions of participants.

Rank and institution type of RREE participants.

Some of the immediate benefits of the RREE were documented through annual evaluation reports. Additionally, Borrego ( 2007 ) investigated the “conceptual hurdles” RREE participants experienced during the workshop as they learned about engineering education research. However, these documentations of RREE focused on immediate and short-term impacts of the workshops. To explore how an intervention like the RREE might have fostered enduring change, we investigated the long-term impacts of the experience on nine participants and then reflected on what the findings of this investigation suggest about ways to foster change in other contexts.

Literature Review

There is a breadth of research that spans studies investigating the design and development of communities of practice. Similarly, change theories and models have been studied extensively in social science research. Here we provide a brief snapshot of previous literature on these two broad categories: communities of practice and change models.

Communities of Practice

Communities of practice (CoP), as defined by Wenger, one of the pioneers of this framework, are “the basic building blocks of social learning systems” ( 2000, p. 229 ). The phrase “community of practice” refers to a group of individuals who share similar interests in a phenomenon and come together in a structured manner to engage in shared practices to create new knowledge. This coming together, however, is more than just a group of people working on a particular task ( Barab & Duffy, 1998 ). Instead, each individual must be tasked with a “legitimate role in society through community participation and membership” ( Barab & Duffy, 1998, p. 49 ).

Through legitimate peripheral participation, defined as “the process of knowledge generation, application, and reproduction” ( Hoadley, 2000, p. 290 ), communities of practice are capable of having significant influence on participants’ learning, perceptions of meaning, and identity development. Learning happens through participation because people begin to embody the knowledge and principles associated with a context as they engage in the world around them. However, “learning is not just acquiring skills and information, it is becoming a certain type of person” (Wegner et al., 2002, p. 12). This is the definition of identity development in the context of a CoP.

Dall’Alba ( 2009 ) posits “the process of becoming a professional occurs through continual interaction with other professionals as well as those outside the profession. It is misleading to attempt to separate the individual from engagement with others in this process of becoming” (p. 42). Also, Hoadley ( 2000 ) recommends “learners must have access to experts and must either perceive themselves to be members or aspire to membership within the community in which expert practices are central” (p. 291). Other researchers ( Barab & Duffy, 1998 ; Hoadley, 2000 ; Wenger et al., 2002 ) discuss the need for social interaction between members within the community as one does not “become a professional in isolation” ( Dall’Alba, 2009, p. 42 ). In that vein, Wenger et al. ( 2002 ) laid out principles that should be considered when creating the setting for a CoP to emerge. Of importance to the RREE are these two principles:

• Develop both public and private community spaces: community activities should provide the opportunity for large-group interaction as well as one-on-one relationship building engagements (p. 28).
• Focus on value: a community’s activities should be designed to provide value to its members’ organization as well as cater to the members’ own individual reasons for participating (p. 28).

Change Models

Change is often discussed as if solely dependent on an individual employing a rational analysis of the current state versus some future state. However, Borrego and Henderson ( 2014 ) state “mounting evidence suggests that the most successful diffusion occurs through personal interactions between individuals or in small groups” (p. 229). We contend that the engineering education community may be overlooking the essential role that building a community plays in the change process.

Diffusion of Innovation

Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation is a predominant model of how change occurs. On the individual level, the innovation process is defined as “the mental process through which an individual passes (1) from first knowledge of an innovation, (2) to forming an attitude toward the innovation, (3) to a decision to adopt or reject, (4) to implementation of the new idea, and to (5) confirmation of this decision” ( Rogers, 2002, p. 990 ). However, individual adoption is just one piece of the puzzle because diffusion transcends the individual. Diffusion “is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (p. 5). This definition conveys the main elements of the diffusion process beyond the individual, namely the innovation, communication channels, time, and the social system. Further, Rogers ( 2010 ) opines:

Diffusion investigations show that most individuals do not evaluate innovation based on scientific studies or its consequences […]. Instead, most people depend mainly upon a subjective evaluation of an innovation that is conveyed to them from other individuals like themselves who have previously adopted the innovation. This dependence on the experience of near peers suggests that the heart of the diffusion process consists of the modeling and imitation by potential adopters of their network partners who have adopted previously (p. 18).

Interaction between members of a social system is, therefore, critical for the diffusion of innovation to foster change. We believe there is room for further exploration of the shape and context of these interactions.

Recent Studies of Diffusion of Innovation in Engineering Education

In 2010, Borrego, Froyd, and Hall surveyed US engineering departments to determine their awareness and use of seven engineering education innovations. Their findings revealed faculty are aware of innovations, have the interest to find out more, and perceive the new teaching method is perhaps beneficial. However, faculty often get stuck in the trial phase and then either give up or modify the innovation to the extent that it no longer works. The authors conclude that faculty need support in the trial phase. This conclusion highlights the utility of being connected to a community of users of the innovation who can provide advice or encouragement while new adopters are trying out the innovation ( Borrego, Froyd & Hall, 2010 ).

In an extensive dissertation study, Siddiqui ( 2014 ) investigated curriculum change within the framework of the Engineer of 2020. He interviewed 33 engineering faculty who had been part of curricular reform efforts on their respective campuses. His findings pointed to the need for a systems approach to change because change efforts must go beyond any one individual’s decision that a course of action (the innovation) is superior to the status quo. This means that initiating and maintaining any change to the organization’s prevalent culture requires movement at all levels of participation. Consequently, Siddiqui contends people must form communities to bring about change as “the openness and engagement of a substantial number of faculty members is crucial for the development of the change process in any institution” (p. 180). One key recommendation from Siddiqui’s work is that change efforts create supportive spaces that foster the development and sustainability of the community.

Movement Approach to Educational Reform

Inspired by the recurring argument that change efforts sometimes fall short in the face of the complexity of educational systems, Parker Palmer ( 1992 ) reflected on the “distinction between an organizational approach and a movement approach to change” (p. 10). In his view, a movement approach is fueled by the opposition that usually slows down-—or completely stalls—organizational approaches to change. To change an organization, the movement approach operates outside the paradigm of the organization. Individuals who want to bring about change must embrace and learn to live with this apparent paradox. Palmer identified four distinct stages to bring about change through the movement approach: 1) individuals decide to stop leading divided lives, meaning individuals stop hiding their true selves and make the choice to publicly declare their passions; 2) these individuals find and support each other and band together; 3) these groups then find their voice and make public the issues they care about; and 4) the vision of these individuals becomes supported by the emergence of alternative rewards and the system is changed. While these four stages are independently observable, they do not proceed linearly but rather iteratively and concurrently ( Palmer, 1992 ). In previous studies, the academic experiences and growth of engineering education scholars were mapped to Palmer’s approach to change ( Smith et al., 2004 ; Pitterson et al., 2016 ). This paper seeks to extend that discussion of change by exploring how it is enacted through workshops intentionally designed to foster community-building, particularly the RREE.

The CoP framework and change models discussed earlier all seek to highlight the role of community-building activities in creating the opportunity for and fostering change. Taken together, the preceding literature supports the design of change initiatives aimed at bolstering community-building among participants. Particularly, our study is informed by the CoP framework. We seek to evaluate how the workshop activities designed using this framework impacted participants’ development as engineering education researchers specifically looking at the tenets of a CoP—learning, meaning, and identity. The nature of our research supports an evaluative approach to understanding how participants’ experience in the RREE program fostered their ability to join an emerging community of researchers and experience enduring change.

Methodology

The aim of this study was to evaluate the long-term impact of participation in the Rigorous Research in Engineering Education (RREE) workshops to identify how a community-building experience like RREE might have fostered enduring change. Specifically, we asked how the workshops affected the participants’ thinking, their work and that of their colleagues, and their departments and institutions. To address these questions, interviews were conducted with a sampling of former RREE participants to learn about the longer-term impact of the project.

Participants for this study were recruited from the group of 149 who previously participated in the RREE workshops. A purposeful sampling of these individuals was done, making an effort to recruit individuals who represented the variations found within the group of RREE alumni. A subgroup of 30 individuals was targeted who were representative of the demographics and diversity of the larger RREE alumni population (see Figure 1 ). This subgroup included:

Sampling procedure.

• Alumni from the three cohorts of the RREE workshops
• Participants from a wide range of institution types
• Faculty at the assistant, associate, and full professor levels

An interview with one participant was used as the pilot for the interview protocol. The remaining 29 RREE alumni were contacted by email and invited to participate in the study. A total of nine RREE alumni were interviewed. Table 2 summarizes the final nine participants, their rank and institution type. Figure 1 summarizes the sampling procedure described above.

Study participants summarized by rank and institution type.

Semi-structured interviews (e.g., Sanjek, 1990 ; Spradley, 1979 ) were conducted to engage participants in in-depth conversations about their RREE experiences, their engineering education research, their involvement in the engineering education research community, and the perceived impact of RREE on their own campuses. The final interview protocol included the following questions and sub-prompts:

Their RREE experience:

• Why did you decide to participate in RREE? What were your expectations or hopes going into the workshop?
• What do you feel that you got out of the workshop? (short-term and long-term)
• What kinds of connections did you make through RREE?

Their engineering education research:

• Have you done any engineering education research since RREE?
• Have you collaborated with anyone on those projects? Or have you interacted with any other scholars regarding the projects? In what ways?
• Other than research collaborations, how else do you interact with other people doing engineering education research?
• What advice would you give other engineering scholars who might want to connect with people to do this type of work?

Their involvement in the engineering education research community:

• What do you think of as the “engineering education community”? How do you define that?
• How active would you say that you are in the engineering education community? What do you do to participate in this community? Conferences? Publishing? Formal or informal ways of connecting?

Perceived impact of RREE on their campuses:

• How would you describe the climate on your campus regarding engineering education or engineering education research? For example, what “counts” as engineering research? Does it include education research?
• Has the climate on your campus changed in the last few years? If so, what kind(s) of changes have you seen? What factors do you think led to these changes?

Each participant was interviewed once by telephone for approximately 45 minutes about three to five years after they attended the RREE workshop. All interviews were conducted by the same researcher to maintain consistency. This researcher, an anthropologist with expertise in conducting research of this nature, had not been involved in RREE and had no pre-existing connections to the workshops or the participants that could have affected the nature of the conversations. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and cleaned. The cleaning process involved removing all identifiers such as names of people, institutions, and any other identifiable information before sharing the data with the research team.

All interview transcripts were qualitatively analyzed (e.g., Glaser & Strauss, 1967 ; Corbin & Strauss, 1998 ) using an inductive method. An initial codebook was created based on the research questions. Two researchers coded a sample of transcripts independently and compared their coding. The code list was then revised to more accurately capture data related to the research question. When the code list was finalized, all nine transcripts, including the transcript from the pilot interview, were coded. Next, themes in the data were identified. Four initial themes were proposed: learning, collaborating, mentoring, and catalyzing. After initial themes were determined, each transcript was re-coded with a particular emphasis on each theme. The themes were once again revised after discussion with the research group. The learning and catalyzing themes remained, collaborating and mentoring were merged into a theme called “identity” and a new theme entitled “meaning” was created. It should be noted that the word “identity” was used in the sense that Wenger ( 1998 ) meant it—focusing on the development of certain personal traits that are the results of learning within a specific social context.

Findings indicate that RREE had multiple types of long-term impacts on these nine participants that facilitated their entry into and increased their participation in the engineering education research community. Four types of impacts emerged as those most frequently mentioned by participants. Three of these impacts map well to Wenger’s notions of learning, meaning, and identity as related to communities of practice ( Wenger, 1998 ; Lave & Wenger, 1991 ). A fourth type of impact also emerged, which seemed to be an outcome of the combination of the other three pieces: RREE as a catalyst, meaning that the participants’ experiences in the RREE workshop provided an impetus that propelled them into taking action and turning their interest in engineering education research into actual practice. Figure 2 summarizes the four impacts found and the relationship between them.

Summary of the impacts of the RREE reported by participants.

Table 3 illustrates the themes, their definitions and the number of participants who described them in their interviews. In addition, the types of impacts identified as most important for individual participants appeared to be related to the nature of the climate at their home institutions.

Type of impact, their definitions, and number of participants who mentioned the themes.

Next, we describe and provide examples of the four types of impacts found in the data. It is important to note that each participant talked about several types of impacts from RREE, and no one’s experience fits completely within a single category. The participants were likely to have experienced other impacts as well, which either did not come up in the interviews or we have chosen not to highlight them in this paper. However, we have extracted excerpts that are representative and illustrative of trends that were identified across the group. More detailed case studies are presented later in the paper. The four case studies were selected because they provide thicker descriptions of how participants described these impacts, and how the impacts fit into the larger context of the participants’ journeys toward increased participation in the CoP.

Learning: What is rigorous research in engineering education?

Learning is used here to refer to the ongoing process of constructing knowledge that is central to a CoP, or as Wenger describes it, “the learning by which newcomers can join the community and thus further its practice” ( 1998, p. 49 ). Impacts cited by participants were coded for learning if the participants discussed new knowledge gained during the workshop about the field of engineering education research.

Eight of the nine interviewees felt that RREE advanced their knowledge about engineering education research. Participants discussed what they learned from RREE in several ways, including learning about educational research theories, specific research methods, what ‘rigorous research’ really means, and general knowledge about the field of engineering education research.

For example, Janet was new to engineering education research and went into the workshop specifically seeking knowledge of the field. Looking back at her RREE experience, Janet felt that she

got enough [out of RREE] to know what I didn’t know, which was a huge step forward. Going in, I just didn’t have any idea how this worked, what was involved. And coming out, I said, now I kind of know what the pieces are. I don’t know how to do them all, or I don’t know how to do most of them, but at least I know what I need to go look for now.

Nick had done a small amount of engineering education research prior to RREE, but found that his RREE experience

did cast or frame engineering education research in a different light, because you know, in my discipline-specific research, of course, the edicts of research are all well laid out. And I think ASEE [American Society of Engineering Education] had just put out a format for what engineering education research should look like. … So I think it did frame that in a different light after spending the four and a half days [at RREE].

In addition to gaining this broad perspective on the field, Nick also gave an example of something very specific that he learned at RREE and later incorporated into his own work: “One thing I learned at RREE was the existence of…a Statics Concept Inventory. … The first time I heard about that was at the RREE, and then I was able to follow up on that.”

Even those who came to RREE with significant prior experience gained some new knowledge about the field. For example, Cathy had been very involved in engineering education research and issues of teaching and learning prior to RREE. For Cathy, RREE provided “an opportunity for learning some of the challenges of connecting engineering folks and education folks.”

Meaning: Constructing and negotiating the meaning of this CoP

Meaning is understood here as something that is negotiated by the CoP and as “a way of talking about our (changing) ability—individually and collectively—to experience our life and the world as meaningful” ( Wenger, 1998, p. 5 ). As such, impacts on participants were coded for meaning when the participants discussed the process of figuring out and constructing what rigorous research in engineering means.

In all nine interviews, the topic of what is or is not rigorous research in engineering education was discussed by the participants. Specifically, the participants talked about 1) how to define engineering education research, 2) who participates in the practices defined as engineering education research (providing an additional way of characterizing what this work is or is not), and 3) the perceived “fuzziness” or fluidity of the community boundaries, hinting at an ongoing process of negotiation of what this work is or is not and who does it.

For example, in defining the CoP, Robert highlighted the common research interest shared by group members:

It’s a group of people that are really interested in how students learn something. So, there’s always the old sort of quandary about… ‘Well I don’t know why the students didn’t learn this. I gave a lecture on that.’ I think what a lot of us realize is, you know you presented the material, but that doesn’t mean they learned it. And how do we make sure that students really learn what the material is? So, if I were to categorize most of the people that I’ve met [in this CoP], that’s really I think sort of the overriding commonality between everyone. You know, what can we do that optimizes how much the students learn?

Janet defined the CoP by describing various levels of participation (core, active, and peripheral), as well as emphasizing community members’ shared notion of “good work,” which may be taken to mean rigorous research in engineering education:

I would sort of look at it as a bull’s eye target. [There are] the people in the center who are the people who are really getting the multimillion-dollar grants, they’re at the centers, they’re doing the big projects. …. And they’re doing it kind of full time. At least that’s my impression. And there are a lot of us, a ring or two out, we sort of know who those people are and know what they’re up to and we’re pretty knowledgeable on that level, but ourselves, we’re not producing at that level and we’re not known at that level. We know that they are doing good work [emphasis added], we recognize good work and we’re hoping to be able to do good work in our own time. And then I think there’s probably another ring or two of the people who show up at ASEE, which is where I was before I went to RREE, and bring a paper that gets accepted, but it’s basically what I did on summer vacation, about what I did in my course this year. Here’s a book report. And some of them probably have some sense that that’s unsatisfying, it’s not what they want to be doing, but they’re not sure how to move to the next level.

Along similar lines, Nick talked about how he had developed his own understanding of the meaning of rigorous research in engineering education before, during, and since the RREE workshop:

In the beginning, the way I defined it was you try a new thing in the class, without any scientific formulation. You just try it. And if it works, and again, what does it mean that it works? … And I did realize when I started reading a little bit of the literature that engineering education research is no different than doing research in your discipline. You know, that you need to have a hypothesis, and you need to set up an experiment, collect data, and the survey instruments have to be calibrated or validated, and you know, there’s enough science behind it, it’s just not a bunch of questions that are thrown at people. And so I really think my definition has changed, and I think it is as intense and as complete as discipline-specific research, at least in the engineering field.

Several participants alluded to the meaning of the community in their comments about the fluidity of its boundaries, including who does or does not do this type of research. For example, as Joanne reflected,

Part of the reason that the edges of the [engineering education research] community are so fuzzy is that there are people who are in it all the time who have titles and business cards that make it very clear that they’re members of that community. And there are other folks who are—who do a chunk of work in that area, but for whatever reason are not 100% of their time [doing] engineering education, teaching, and research. … We all should be part of the engineering education community. But it means more to some people than others.

Identity: Identifying as a member of the CoP

Identity is also an integral part of the social learning that takes place in CoPs and can be seen as “a way of talking about how learning changes who we are and creates personal histories of becoming in the context of our communities” ( Wenger, 1998, p. 49 ). Wenger also asserts that, “the formation of a CoP is also the negotiation of identities” ( 1998, p. 149 ). Following this notion of identity, impacts on participants were coded for identity when the participants discussed in various ways how they came to think of themselves as members of the engineering education research community.

All nine of the participants talked about ways in which their RREE experience increased their identification with both the RREE community and the broader engineering education research community. In these comments, it became apparent that the RREE workshops gave these participants a greater sense that they were now truly part of this particular community. This was indicated when they identified themselves as practitioners and also when they commented on others’ perceptions of them as legitimate members of this CoP. The participants’ observations about others’ perceptions often came across in discussions of networking and collaboration. For example, some participants expressed that post-RREE it was easier to connect with colleagues to form collaborations on engineering education projects because they now were recognized by others as legitimate members of the community.

As Matthew reflected,

I have a good network of people that are interested in this work. And I certainly didn’t meet all of them at RREE. But I met some of them at RREE. And it also gave me the confidence to kind of go off and do more projects in this area and to kind of establish, at least, a small reputation in this area that made it easier for me to contact people and say, you know, ‘You want to work with me?’ … I think prior to RREE, I’m not sure I would have thought of actually contacting them as friends and saying, ‘I want to do a research project together.

Similarly, Andy noted that although he “didn’t even realize it was such a burgeoning field until I went to RREE and ASEE and started connecting with these people,” he did in fact meet several people who he continues to see at conferences and other venues. He reflected that, “there are a few individuals I keep running into who are really working hard to try to— like myself [emphasis added], to try to make sense of this, to do significant research to try to get this part of our careers jump started. And those have been very, very invaluable.” By commenting that colleagues who are doing engineering education research are “like [him]self,” Andy implied his identification with the broader CoP, especially since his RREE experience.

Joanne highlighted the important role of RREE in giving participants, such as herself, a connection to the CoP that is recognized by others and which provides a starting point for networking with other members of the community. She noted that in an interdisciplinary field such as engineering education research, “You’ve got this higher networking cost. You’ve got a more difficult time finding a home for your work.” For Joanne, going to RREE helped facilitate the networking that had been a hurdle for her. She commented:

And simply by meeting a few extra people, being able to walk into a room and see somebody you know and walk up to them and say, ‘Hi.’ That’s a huge confidence boost. And I think that because most of the people who are looking at community and CoP are established members of the community, they forget that very simple, small benefit down at the bottom of the list, and how powerful it is to the new folks.

For others, the networking they did at RREE not only helped them start new research projects, but also helped them make career moves. Jill acknowledged the role of RREE in the re-framing of her professional self, and credited the connections she made at the workshop with her finding a new position at another university:

My participation in RREE and my connections with that world, I put it in my bio as a professional development thing and a connectedness, and those connections that were made through RREE are definitely a factor in my being hired at [new university].

Catalyst: Propelling participants into action for change

In addition to the three types of impacts discussed above, four of the nine interviewees reported impacts that were meaningful for them, yet did not fit neatly into the learning, meaning, or identity categories. We are calling this type of impact catalyzing , and by this we mean instances in which the RREE experience enabled these participants to make the leap from simply being interested in engineering education research to actually conducting a research project. Each of the participants who talked about the catalyst for change type of impact also mentioned other important impacts that fell into the categories of learning, meaning, and/or identity; however, significant pieces of their stories fell outside of these three categories and seemed to merit closer examination. The participants’ discussions of how the other three types of impacts worked in combination to result in a push toward becoming more active participants in the engineering education research community were especially intriguing. Those who reported that RREE had a catalyst for change type of impact talked about it in a variety of ways, such as providing a road map or mechanism for doing engineering education research, “forcing” them to get started on a research project, giving them the confidence to start conversations with other scholars that led to collaborations, or even having an “epiphany” about how to do this type of work.

For example, Matthew recalled that:

I was an engineering faculty member who had started doing some educational research but had no real education background and was looking for kind of the mechanism to take my research to the next level.

He then attended the RREE workshop, which

gave me some specific incentive to contact someone to be a mentor and participate on the project, and it gave them enough money as enough of an excuse to kind of, you know, clear some time off their calendar to work with me. … RREE gave me a more, kind of fundable framework for doing engineering education projects. And that fundable framework makes it easier to contact people that you already kind of knew and liked, but to propose some formal fundable collaborations.

For Andy, “RREE sort of cracked open the door to a whole new discipline. … It’s like this whole new world opens for you.” Andy recalled that

I did have sort of an epiphany [at the RREE] about what the difference was between assessment and evaluation and doing research. … What I’d been trying to do with before was…try to measure the input, try to measure the output, which is always really hard with people as opposed to engineering systems, and look at the difference between the input and the output. And what [RREE] really turned me on to was the fact that you have to not only measure the input and the output to see if there’s a change, but you have to apply a theory to try to understand what’s going on inside the system. And that sort of theoretical underpinning of some of these things is sort of what, over time, I’ve gotten more and more an appreciation for.

Later in this paper, we will further explore the catalyst type of impact. Although this was not the most frequently mentioned impact, it becomes significant when we look at who did or did not mention it. The four participants who indicated that RREE had a catalyst for change type impact all described the climate of their home institutions as posing various types of barriers to doing this type of work. In contrast, those who did not mention the catalyzing effect all worked in settings that facilitated, at least to some degree, their doing engineering education research. The catalyst impact is also important to examine because it seems to be a key for building capacity in engineering education research. Getting started on engineering education research projects—the core practice for this CoP—is often a hurdle for scholars, and the RREE model seems to have effectively given many participants sufficient impetus to clear that hurdle.

Stories that illustrate common themes

To provide a fuller picture of the catalyst for change type of impact, and to place this impact within the broader context of participants’ journeys into and within the CoP, four individuals’ stories or case studies are presented here.

The stories of Edward, Andy, Joanne, and David were selected because they represent common themes that were found across multiple participants’ interviews. Additionally, these stories provide a thick description ( Geertz, 1994 ) of the participants’ perspectives rather than fragmented excerpts of their stories. They also illustrate the important role that context or climate can play in what people need and ultimately gain from experiences such as RREE. In particular, these stories demonstrate how the catalyst for change type of impact is especially important for participants coming from contexts in which engineering education research is not strongly supported.

Edward and Andy describe situations where they felt that their institutional climate was a barrier to doing engineering education research. For each of these participants, the RREE experience provided the necessary boost for them to move ahead and do this type of work despite the contextual barriers—one by finding a way to make it work at his home institution, and the other by seeking out a new institution with a climate more conducive to this work. In contrast, Joanne provides an example of a situation where the institutional climate was not a barrier. For Joanne, a catalyst was not as crucial, and RREE’s most significant impact was the networking that allowed her to increase her identification with and deepen her participation in the broader CoP. In the final story, David experienced the change from a less supportive to a more supportive environment.

Edward: “Participating in RREE forced me to actually do something”

Before participating in RREE, Edward had been doing some work in faculty development, and his interest in the education side of engineering was growing. He had “made a couple of little attempts” at doing rigorous research in engineering “without really knowing much about what I was doing.” Getting started with engineering education research was not an easy task for Edward, largely because this type of research is not supported—and does not “count”—in his department. He noted that,

I’m probably the only one on this campus really doing engineering education research like this. You know, really rigorous stuff. There’s plenty of people that are interested in teaching and that have done faculty development stuff. … So there’s that environment for it. But when it comes to research, no, it doesn’t count.

He went on to point out that even though he recently got an NSF grant to do engineering education research—which would seem to validate the work—his department chair still had the perception that,

Well, that’s just education. That doesn’t count. … I’ve gotten, you know, various awards and things for teaching. So, there is some recognition. But I would say, bottom line, you know, I put in a pre-review package for promotion to full professor. And it really got shot down at the department level. And actually, the college was kinder, but it really got shot down at the department level. Because of the level of, the rate of publication in engineering stuff.

Edward did not expect the climate in his department to change any time soon, noting that, “there’s no desire to hire” more people doing this kind of work.

Despite the barriers posed by his department, Edward had been interested in engineering education issues for quite a while before RREE came along and he continued looking for a way to learn more about this type of research. When he heard about RREE, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so. He had been

looking for the opportunity, and I was kind of scratching my head. And this thing just popped up in my email. And, you know, that was perfect. Exactly what I wanted to do. And I got lucky enough to be able to go that first year.

Reflecting on his RREE experience, Edward felt that participating in the workshop gave him “the start of understanding how education research really is performed, what you do.” Other impacts included his adoption of qualitative research methods (which he did not know much about before RREE), networking with other engineering education scholars, and some research collaborations post-RREE. However, for Edward the greatest impact of RREE seems to have been the “boost” it gave him, acting as the catalyst he needed to move him from simply being interested in engineering education issues to conducting his own rigorous research in this area.

One way that RREE helped Edward was by providing a mini grant. A small grant ($2000) was budgeted into the initial proposal for the workshop to encourage participants to design and conduct small projects in tandem with other people they met while at RREE. “What that did,” he recalled, “was it gave me the money to actually do something. And so rather than sitting there in a workshop and saying, ‘Yeah, mm hmm, OK, I understand. That makes sense.’ Right? You’re forced to go ahead and actually do something and figure out what you really do understand and what you don’t. And really make your own path, which is what I did.”

At the time of the interview, Edward had several engineering education research projects underway, both on his own and with collaborators, that he felt may not have been possible without the impetus provided by RREE. RREE helped him move from having an interest in engineering education research to starting projects—particularly collaborative ones—in a couple of ways. The mini grant provided a boost by giving him the financial means (and imperative) to fit this kind of work into his schedule. RREE also gave him the confidence, knowledge, and focus that made it easier for him to approach people (at conferences, for example) and start the type of productive conversations that could lead to collaborations.

Reflecting on the pathway into engineering education research, he hypothesized that it would be difficult if a person did not have the kind of focus that he did after completing the RREE workshop. He commented that even if someone were to attend the right conferences (e.g., ASEE or AERA [American Educational Research Association]), but came in thinking, “I don’t even know what I’m doing,” the conversations that would ensue would not be as productive. He reflected that:

You can go to meetings. You can go to ASEE, you can go to AERA and listen, and then try to talk to people. And you can meet a lot of people. It’s a very open group. But…I’m not sure that that gets you an opportunity. Really, the only way I think you can do it is to figure out how to run your own little mini project. I mean, that’s why I think RREE, and then the follow-ons are going to be so good. Because otherwise, you’re just sort of, to me…I just think you’re overwhelmed, or you’re just sort of swimming in this area. You don’t really know what to look at.

Whereas if a person has already done a project, or has at least begun focusing on a specific topic, he or she will be more likely to notice relevant papers and understand others’ research better, which helps lead to stronger connections with potential collaborators. As Edward pointed out, “I think that’s where it comes in, because you have specific things to talk about. So, I can list a whole ton of other people that I’ve met at these meetings that I think are really neat people to talk to. But I’m not sure that anything’s ever going to come out of it. Because, you know, our areas don’t necessarily overlap.” What’s really necessary, he felt, to spark and fuel collaboration is to “have a project and seeing where there’s some complementary possibilities that you can do together. I think you have to have – at least for me, I think, I had to have an idea of what I was doing to be able to do that.” For Edward, RREE provided him with that essential idea, and he moved on from there.

Despite the challenges posed by his home department, Edward continued to engage in collaborations with colleagues on his own campus and elsewhere. As he reflected, “You know, I wasn’t hired to do this, I just do it.”

Andy: “This is my real passion,” but “I’m trying to lead a double life.”

Like Edward, Andy applied for the RREE workshop with the goal of turning his interest in engineering education into actual research projects. He found that RREE did give him the boost he needed in terms of refining his research goals and strengthening his certainty that this was something he wanted to pursue. However, his department had not been very supportive of his doing this sort of research (i.e. work that lies outside of traditional engineering topics), which led him to consider alternate ways for him to follow his interests and do more engineering education research.

Before attending RREE, Andy had been “pursuing engineering education somewhat completely on my own without knowing a lot of the stuff that was going on with ERM [the Educational Research Methods division of ASEE] or even ASEE.” He explained that on his campus, “I’m about the only person in engineering who’s pursuing this seriously.” RREE seemed to be “an opportunity to start to learn more about [engineering education research], and I didn’t even realize it was such a burgeoning field until I went to RREE and ASEE and started connecting with these people.”

Attending the RREE workshop solidified or confirmed for Andy that engineering education research was an area that he really wanted to pursue. He realized that, “this is my real passion. If [a recent grant proposal] gets funded, I think I really am going to steer completely in this direction. […] I’m beginning to realize that people in psychology, social sciences, humanities who do good research…are really, really good at what they do.” However, Andy acknowledged that he had some barriers to overcome before he could easily change his course in the direction of engineering education research. He explained that, thus far, he had some difficulty in getting this type of research agenda going—so much so that he has considered making significant career changes:

I sort of had the impression that I could do this in addition to maintaining my other research. And it hasn’t really worked out that way. So, I’ve really sort of been teetering on the edge of a career change right now. … Am I going to be able to try to keep both things going, albeit both at half speed? Do I want to get out of this and go back to my original research? Or do I want to sort of get out of my original research and do this full time?

Andy attributed at least some of this difficulty to the climate at his institution. He said that doing research outside the boundaries of traditional, technical engineering is “really a fight, I think, at my institution.” In addition, he felt a bit isolated at his institution, being the “only one” doing engineering education research and lacking local collaborators for projects. He reflected that, “I feel like where I am and who I have to collaborate with makes it very, very difficult for me to do research like [the RREE facilitators] and what some of these other people who are in departments of engineering education are able to do.” He felt that his efforts to actively enter the field of engineering education research had moved slowly so far because “I still don’t know enough, and I don’t have the colleagues locally to help me select and decide what the important problems are.”

I see myself locally as trying to rally the troops. Because I have to. I’m really – I’m one of these people who needs to belong, who needs to be surrounded by people who can support me during moments of doubt. And that’s something I don’t have, so I’m very much trying to create my own community here, and finding it very hard to do that, with mixed success. I have trouble with the long-distance collaborations, just because I’m swamped with things I have to do because I’m trying to lead this double life. So, I do sort of step into the community occasionally, at the conferences, meet people, talk to people, and then I sort of withdraw and do my own thing. I’ve not really found a way to maintain the kind of collaborations—at [an institution with a focus on Engineering Education] it would be much different, I think. I could just step out of my office and go talk to people. But I can’t do that here so I’m really—because we get no support for travel whatsoever. Unless I bring in money, I can’t go to the conferences. So it’s really picking and choosing which conferences I go to since I’m trying to lead this double life.

Joanne: “I have the world’s most supportive department,” but “RREE helped me connect to the broader community”

Unlike some RREE participants, Joanne’s home institution has provided a very supportive climate for doing engineering education research. That climate was actually a factor in Joanne’s seeking a position at that school. She reflected that, “I found a perfect option. It’s a great balance. I’m actually rewarded for spending time with undergraduates, but I’m also doing high-level funded research. And the powers that be think that’s just great.” When asked if her department was supportive of her work, she replied, “In my department, absolutely. In my college, it depends on who you’re talking to. I have the world’s most supportive department.”

When Joanne heard about RREE, she was looking for a way to move her current engineering education research further along, rather than needing an initial boost to get started. She recalled that she decided to apply for RREE because she was “looking for more training, specifically in engineering education research. I had a minor in education and an engineering PhD, so I spoke enough of the language that I could sound good. But I needed that assistance, and I needed that assistance from people who truly understood both worlds, instead of just from one side, or one side at a time.” Before attending RREE, Joanne had done a few engineering education research studies, but reflected that “I’m not sure I would have truly called it research, based on what I know now.”

Unlike Andy and Edward, Joanne felt that the greatest impacts of the RREE workshop were new knowledge and opportunities for networking, which map, respectively, to the learning and identity types of impacts described above. As she reflected, “I got several things [from RREE]. One is that systems view. I feel confident blending both worlds now. Another is an ability to articulate, particularly to focus on my campus what the heck it is that I do.” When asked if she would be doing education engineering research if she had not gone to RREE, she replied:

I would still be working in the field, but I wouldn’t have some of the opportunities that I have now, and I’d be doing studies, but I wouldn’t have a research agenda. And I’m not sure I understood how different those two are until after the path that RREE sent me down. So some of it is the conversations and what I learned there, some of it’s the conversations with folks since then, and some of it’s other directions that those conversations have sent me. Organizations I’ve joined, conferences I went to that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Joanne went on to describe the networking opportunities that RREE provided. “I met a lot of people, people who I can pick up the phone now and say, ‘Hey, I’m putting together X, I need someone to do Y, would you be willing?’”

Joanne gave an example of a collaboration that occurred in part because of the connections she had made at the RREE workshop. She and a colleague at her home institution were considering submitting a proposal for a study based on their campus. However, they realized that they would need additional collaborators and would need to look outside of their university to find them:

One of the first things that we realized is that everyone who is qualified on our campus to do the research part—both of us—were involved as participant instructors. And so if we did the data collection and analysis as well, we will bias—or potentially could bias our study. So we picked up the phone and called someone that we’d met and gotten to know at RREE. Because when you’re handing over a chunk of your studies to someone else to run, you want to know that they know what they’re doing, and that they’re going to have follow-through. … And she said yes based off of a three-page research outline, because she had gotten to know us well enough as well, that she knew that she wasn’t being harassed to put her name on something that was iffy.

Joanne was very aware of the important role that institutional climate plays in pursuing research interests outside the tradition of one’s department, such as engineering education research. She reflected that in order to really be able to do this type of work, “You either have to have someone really good who can shelter you on your campus…or you need some sort of flag you can raise that causes everyone else to kind of go, well, OK, I guess that person must know what he/she is doing.” Joanne explained that those “flags” are sometimes funding for the research, like NSF awards. She encouraged people who are considering branching out to a new area of research outside of their disciplinary tradition (such as engineering education research) to:

know what the expectations are for your own institution. And make a decision. Are those the expectations that you want to live with? … So if this is something that you really want to do and you don’t want to wait, then one thing you need to do is take a look at where you are and is that the right place for you. … Once you’re in the right place, whether you were there all along or you had to move to get there, again, know what the expectations are … Because you can adjust things based on those expectations.

No matter what type of climate scholars find at their home institutions, Joanne emphasized the value of reaching out and connecting to the larger engineering education research community. Joanne was fortunate to have found a home for herself at an institution that supported her interest in engineering education research. As a result, she had already begun doing engineering education research prior to attending RREE, and the potential catalyst impact of RREE was not significant for her. However, she did appreciate RREE’s role in helping her connect with and participate in the broader CoP. For example, after attending RREE Joanne made a point of going to engineering education conferences, such as ASEE. There, she found that, “people very quickly took me under their wing. That’s one of the really great things about this community. It is a lot of people who practice what they preach. And since these are the folks preaching things like CoP, they actually do it.”

The important role of campus climate is illustrated in the following story.

David: “It’s the support you get from the administration that I recognize as being the key.”

In the case of one participant, David, a change in department chair brought a change in the departmental climate, which removed some of the barriers he had been facing along his pathway into engineering education research. When David began doing engineering education research, it was clear that in his department, education-related research, publications, or awards did not “count” in the same way as technical engineering research. This posed some difficulties for David as he worked toward promotion to full professor. However, because he felt so strongly that engineering education research was a direction he wanted to pursue (a conviction that was confirmed by his RREE experience), he continued to work in this field, despite knowing that it might not help advance his career. Once he got promoted, he planned on talking with his chair about his interest in focusing mainly on education research rather than technical research, but in the interim he felt “stuck.”

Before David reached the point of going up for promotion, his department undertook a search for a new chair. The person chosen as the new chair turned out to be much more supportive of nontraditional faculty paths, and David felt comfortable going to him and discussing his wish to “wind down” his technical research and “switch over to just education stuff.” Although the chair let David know that such a switch could still pose difficulties for promotion, he was open to thinking about “ways to get around that, and ways that he felt he could support me and things he thought I could do that would help develop a case for promotion.”

This made a significant difference for David, who began to feel that his work and accomplishments were valued in his department. This seemed to boost his morale and energized him to escalate his involvement in education research. He reflected, “It’s the support you get from the administration that I recognize as being the key.” He emphasized the importance of having a supportive environment for following a nontraditional path like his, asserting that, “You have to have someone that you feel that you can talk to, that’s going to support you. …You can’t do it on your own.” David’s story illustrates the vital role of community in supporting professional growth. While participants reported that the RREE provided an off-site community, local community is also very important.

These three elements (learning, meaning, and identity) interact to function as a catalyst to help faculty gain the knowledge, social networks, and confidence to make changes in their research practice. This catalytic function is particularly important for faculty who describe their campus climate as “not supportive” of their engineering education research efforts. Implications are that RREE-type programs can provide faculty with the catalyst for change to overcome this barrier.

The findings of this research serve to demonstrate that the use of a community of practice model to build research capacity in engineering education can have significant impacts on newcomers’ entry and continued engagement. In addition to learning about educational research methods and theories, the nine participants highlighted in this paper felt they were part of the engineering education research community and had the confidence to engage with others and form collaborations. This is important not only for building research capacity but also in bringing about change.

Fostering a Community of Practice

The RREE project was intentionally designed to foster a CoP. These workshops were intended to build the engineering education research community by establishing “the structure and mechanism for training faculty to conduct rigorous engineering education research through a collaboration of engineering educators, learning scientists, and faculty developers” ( Borrego et al., 2006, p. 2 ).

In keeping with the three elements of a CoP described by Wenger et al. ( 2002 ), the RREE project’s domain of knowledge was the emerging rigorous approach to engineering education research, the community was a group of participants with various disciplinary backgrounds drawn from various institutions, and the shared practice was characterized by the activities the participants engaged in during and after the workshops were completed. The three levels of participation as discussed by Wenger et al. ( 2002 ) (depicted in Figure 1 ) were also mirrored in the structure of the workshops: the core group was represented by an executive committee of the RREE, the active group was represented by the facilitators of the workshops, and the peripheral group was represented by the participants in each cohort.

The structure of the workshops was also developed based on the CoP recommendations of Wenger et al. ( 2002 ). Table 4 summarizes how the workshops were designed to align with these recommendations. Our findings suggest that, as we had hoped, the RREE did foster the emergence of a CoP. Therefore, designers of other learning environments may want to incorporate the structural elements listed in Table 4 in their designs as a mechanism to encourage the growth of other kinds of CoPs.

How the design of RREE workshops aligned with CoP recommendations ( R. Streveler, Smith, and Miller 2005 ).

Implications for Promoting Change

As RREE participant David mentioned earlier in the paper, “you can’t do it on your own.” But what happens when there is no one at your home institution who supports your work? We now triangulate our results with ideas from two other researchers who have studied change: Siddiqui and Palmer.

Forming neighborhoods

Siddiqui ( 2014 ) studied participants in another engineering education research workshop and found that “the established perspectives or standpoints of individuals in the prevalent paradigm can prevent [members] from moving to a perspective in an alternate paradigm” ( Siddiqui, 2014, p. 161 ), meaning faculty trying to institute change may find their efforts blocked by opposing colleagues. Therefore, it is not surprising that a critical mass of change agents is needed to be able to bring about institutional change.

Programs like the RREE can become catalysts for helping people find each other and for giving people the confidence to seek out collaborators at other institutions. RREE participants spoke about the RREE as a way that people interested in engineering education research found each other. The RREE project itself exposed participants to other researchers who had similar interests and research ideas. Siddiqui describes this phenomenon as allowing people to “come together in a neighborhood” ( Siddiqui, 2014, p. 233 ). The design of the RREE provided this opportunity and our participants reported leaving the workshops having made connections they did not have before and setting the intention to work on research projects with other participants who have similar ideas.

The movement approach

We also feel our work resonates with the four stages identified by Parker Palmer’s movement approach to change , which thrives amidst opposition ( Palmer, 1992 ). According to Palmer, change begins when people choose to leave behind “divided lives” and become whole. Andy’s comment about leading a “double life” very explicitly invokes this stage. Parker calls this finding integrity (Stage 1). People then begin to find others who share their views and interests (Stage 2, corporate support ), and once support is found they then can go public (Stage 3) and can begin to institute change by adding their voices to the community discussion. These stages are exhibited repeatedly in RREE participants’ interviews. Participants discuss their new-found identity as a legitimate engineering education researcher and their confidence to engage others in collaboration. In Stage 4, the community challenges the system to create alternative rewards that can sustain the vision brought about by the change. This stage is represented by the formalization of systems that recognize and reward the efforts of change agents. For example, since the RREE workshop several engineering education departments and centers have been formed through which numerous students have graduated with PhDs and have been gainfully employed as engineering education researchers.

Overall, this study has demonstrated that to some degree that for change initiatives to be successful, it is not enough to just have change agents find each other. Instead, we argue change initiatives create opportunities for agents to find each other through which they can further explore commonalities and develop relationships that were discussed extensively by our participants. These relationships will lead to long-term collaboration which in turn can result in creating communities of practice.

Limitations

This study utilized a qualitative approach to explore the lingering impact of a series of workshops designed to develop a community of practice as new engineering education researchers entered the field. Because of its qualitative nature, the study yielded unambiguous results that might not be generalizable to the whole engineering education research community. Our goal was to recruit 30 participants intentionally chosen from the entire group of 149 attendees. However, the resulting study had nine participants. To help address the low participant numbers, we provided thick descriptions of our participants’ perspectives in our findings. As our goal was not to generalize our findings, we deem this number of participants to be appropriate.

All project and subsequent research activities were designed with the CoP as the initial framework. Consequently, the analysis and results were framed using the CoP framework, which may have biased our results. Palmer’s movement approach was only included in the study to guide the discussion. Future studies can seek to use the movement approach or any other change model at the onset of designing a study of similar nature.

The sample of participants leaned heavily on those from the 2005 and 2006 cohorts. We only included one participant from the 2004 cohort because for the first cohort participants were selected only on a first-come first-serve basis. However, in 2005 and 2006 a much more intentional approach was instituted that rated participants’ applications on the intellectual merit and broader impact of their research and on their institutional support.

The RREE set out to model a CoP to facilitate people’s entry into and participation in the field of engineering education research. This paper describes changes in RREE participants’ identity as engineering education researchers, their understanding of the meaning of rigorous research in engineering education , and their knowledge about the methods and theories of engineering education research. These findings are consistent with Wenger’s proposal that a CoP will impact the learning, meaning, and identity of its participants. Perhaps of most interest is that the RREE took on the role of a catalyst for the nine participants in our study who did not experience being supported by their institution and thus the RREE served as a way for these isolated members to enter the community of engineering education researchers. Both Palmer ( 1992 ) and Siddiqui ( 2014 ) stress that in order for change to begin isolated individuals must first “find each other.” In this sense, the community-based philosophy underlying the design of the RREE impacted these participants individually and helped them feel part of the engineering education research community.

We believe the power of social networks to bring about change has been overlooked in the engineering education research community. We propose that when designing an intervention to bring about change, attention should be paid to ways to foster the social aspects of an intervention. By social aspects we mean including time for reflection and informal conversations in the intervention design, providing opportunities for people to self-organize and find others who share their interests, and providing the physical space where ad hoc groups can gather. Because the RREE intended to build a CoP, we made sure there was protected time and physical space for pairs and small groups to interact. The location of the RREE workshops were intentionally chosen to provide participants with a relaxing physical atmosphere. The layout of the facility and the unstructured time built into the workshop days provided participants the opportunity to reflect alone and with each other, process the information they had learned, and cultivate personal and collaborative relationships with their fellow participants. With this in mind, workshop designers must allow time and space for participants to meet each other. Instead of scheduling every moment with content to be learned, it is important to provide time for participants to connect with each other. More broadly, we challenge the community of change researchers to consider the importance of social factors in fostering enduring change.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0341127, 0517528, and 0411994. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

We wish to thank Etienne Wenger who generously commented on an early draft of this paper and Tameka Clarke Douglas and Nataliia Perova-Mello for their contributions to data collection and analysis. Last but not least, we thank the RREE participants who provided their reflections.

Competing Interests

The authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

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What the Case Study Method Really Teaches

by Nitin Nohria

Summary .   

It’s been 100 years since Harvard Business School began using the case study method. Beyond teaching specific subject matter, the case study method excels in instilling meta-skills in students. This article explains the importance of seven such skills: preparation, discernment, bias recognition, judgement, collaboration, curiosity, and self-confidence.

During my decade as dean of Harvard Business School, I spent hundreds of hours talking with our alumni. To enliven these conversations, I relied on a favorite question: “What was the most important thing you learned from your time in our MBA program?”

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Case Study Research Method in Psychology

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Case studies are in-depth investigations of a person, group, event, or community. Typically, data is gathered from various sources using several methods (e.g., observations & interviews).

The case study research method originated in clinical medicine (the case history, i.e., the patient’s personal history). In psychology, case studies are often confined to the study of a particular individual.

The information is mainly biographical and relates to events in the individual’s past (i.e., retrospective), as well as to significant events that are currently occurring in his or her everyday life.

The case study is not a research method, but researchers select methods of data collection and analysis that will generate material suitable for case studies.

Freud (1909a, 1909b) conducted very detailed investigations into the private lives of his patients in an attempt to both understand and help them overcome their illnesses.

This makes it clear that the case study is a method that should only be used by a psychologist, therapist, or psychiatrist, i.e., someone with a professional qualification.

There is an ethical issue of competence. Only someone qualified to diagnose and treat a person can conduct a formal case study relating to atypical (i.e., abnormal) behavior or atypical development.

 Famous Case Studies

• Anna O – One of the most famous case studies, documenting psychoanalyst Josef Breuer’s treatment of “Anna O” (real name Bertha Pappenheim) for hysteria in the late 1800s using early psychoanalytic theory.
• Little Hans – A child psychoanalysis case study published by Sigmund Freud in 1909 analyzing his five-year-old patient Herbert Graf’s house phobia as related to the Oedipus complex.
• Bruce/Brenda – Gender identity case of the boy (Bruce) whose botched circumcision led psychologist John Money to advise gender reassignment and raise him as a girl (Brenda) in the 1960s.
• Genie Wiley – Linguistics/psychological development case of the victim of extreme isolation abuse who was studied in 1970s California for effects of early language deprivation on acquiring speech later in life.
• Phineas Gage – One of the most famous neuropsychology case studies analyzes personality changes in railroad worker Phineas Gage after an 1848 brain injury involving a tamping iron piercing his skull.

Clinical Case Studies

• Studying the effectiveness of psychotherapy approaches with an individual patient
• Assessing and treating mental illnesses like depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD
• Neuropsychological cases investigating brain injuries or disorders

Child Psychology Case Studies

• Studying psychological development from birth through adolescence
• Cases of learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, ADHD
• Effects of trauma, abuse, deprivation on development

Types of Case Studies

• Explanatory case studies : Used to explore causation in order to find underlying principles. Helpful for doing qualitative analysis to explain presumed causal links.
• Exploratory case studies : Used to explore situations where an intervention being evaluated has no clear set of outcomes. It helps define questions and hypotheses for future research.
• Descriptive case studies : Describe an intervention or phenomenon and the real-life context in which it occurred. It is helpful for illustrating certain topics within an evaluation.
• Multiple-case studies : Used to explore differences between cases and replicate findings across cases. Helpful for comparing and contrasting specific cases.
• Intrinsic : Used to gain a better understanding of a particular case. Helpful for capturing the complexity of a single case.
• Collective : Used to explore a general phenomenon using multiple case studies. Helpful for jointly studying a group of cases in order to inquire into the phenomenon.

Where Do You Find Data for a Case Study?

There are several places to find data for a case study. The key is to gather data from multiple sources to get a complete picture of the case and corroborate facts or findings through triangulation of evidence. Most of this information is likely qualitative (i.e., verbal description rather than measurement), but the psychologist might also collect numerical data.

1. Primary sources

• Interviews – Interviewing key people related to the case to get their perspectives and insights. The interview is an extremely effective procedure for obtaining information about an individual, and it may be used to collect comments from the person’s friends, parents, employer, workmates, and others who have a good knowledge of the person, as well as to obtain facts from the person him or herself.
• Observations – Observing behaviors, interactions, processes, etc., related to the case as they unfold in real-time.
• Documents & Records – Reviewing private documents, diaries, public records, correspondence, meeting minutes, etc., relevant to the case.

2. Secondary sources

• News/Media – News coverage of events related to the case study.
• Academic articles – Journal articles, dissertations etc. that discuss the case.
• Government reports – Official data and records related to the case context.
• Books/films – Books, documentaries or films discussing the case.

3. Archival records

Searching historical archives, museum collections and databases to find relevant documents, visual/audio records related to the case history and context.

Public archives like newspapers, organizational records, photographic collections could all include potentially relevant pieces of information to shed light on attitudes, cultural perspectives, common practices and historical contexts related to psychology.

4. Organizational records

Organizational records offer the advantage of often having large datasets collected over time that can reveal or confirm psychological insights.

Of course, privacy and ethical concerns regarding confidential data must be navigated carefully.

However, with proper protocols, organizational records can provide invaluable context and empirical depth to qualitative case studies exploring the intersection of psychology and organizations.

• Organizational/industrial psychology research : Organizational records like employee surveys, turnover/retention data, policies, incident reports etc. may provide insight into topics like job satisfaction, workplace culture and dynamics, leadership issues, employee behaviors etc.
• Clinical psychology : Therapists/hospitals may grant access to anonymized medical records to study aspects like assessments, diagnoses, treatment plans etc. This could shed light on clinical practices.
• School psychology : Studies could utilize anonymized student records like test scores, grades, disciplinary issues, and counseling referrals to study child development, learning barriers, effectiveness of support programs, and more.

How do I Write a Case Study in Psychology?

Follow specified case study guidelines provided by a journal or your psychology tutor. General components of clinical case studies include: background, symptoms, assessments, diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes. Interpreting the information means the researcher decides what to include or leave out. A good case study should always clarify which information is the factual description and which is an inference or the researcher’s opinion.

1. Introduction

• Provide background on the case context and why it is of interest, presenting background information like demographics, relevant history, and presenting problem.
• Compare briefly to similar published cases if applicable. Clearly state the focus/importance of the case.

2. Case Presentation

• Describe the presenting problem in detail, including symptoms, duration,and impact on daily life.
• Include client demographics like age and gender, information about social relationships, and mental health history.
• Describe all physical, emotional, and/or sensory symptoms reported by the client.
• Use patient quotes to describe the initial complaint verbatim. Follow with full-sentence summaries of relevant history details gathered, including key components that led to a working diagnosis.
• Summarize clinical exam results, namely orthopedic/neurological tests, imaging, lab tests, etc. Note actual results rather than subjective conclusions. Provide images if clearly reproducible/anonymized.
• Clearly state the working diagnosis or clinical impression before transitioning to management.

3. Management and Outcome

• Indicate the total duration of care and number of treatments given over what timeframe. Use specific names/descriptions for any therapies/interventions applied.
• Present the results of the intervention,including any quantitative or qualitative data collected.
• For outcomes, utilize visual analog scales for pain, medication usage logs, etc., if possible. Include patient self-reports of improvement/worsening of symptoms. Note the reason for discharge/end of care.

4. Discussion

• Analyze the case, exploring contributing factors, limitations of the study, and connections to existing research.
• Analyze the effectiveness of the intervention,considering factors like participant adherence, limitations of the study, and potential alternative explanations for the results.
• Identify any questions raised in the case analysis and relate insights to established theories and current research if applicable. Avoid definitive claims about physiological explanations.
• Offer clinical implications, and suggest future research directions.

5. Additional Items

• Thank specific assistants for writing support only. No patient acknowledgments.
• References should directly support any key claims or quotes included.
• Use tables/figures/images only if substantially informative. Include permissions and legends/explanatory notes.
• Provides detailed (rich qualitative) information.
• Provides insight for further research.
• Permitting investigation of otherwise impractical (or unethical) situations.

Case studies allow a researcher to investigate a topic in far more detail than might be possible if they were trying to deal with a large number of research participants (nomothetic approach) with the aim of ‘averaging’.

Because of their in-depth, multi-sided approach, case studies often shed light on aspects of human thinking and behavior that would be unethical or impractical to study in other ways.

Research that only looks into the measurable aspects of human behavior is not likely to give us insights into the subjective dimension of experience, which is important to psychoanalytic and humanistic psychologists.

Case studies are often used in exploratory research. They can help us generate new ideas (that might be tested by other methods). They are an important way of illustrating theories and can help show how different aspects of a person’s life are related to each other.

The method is, therefore, important for psychologists who adopt a holistic point of view (i.e., humanistic psychologists ).

Limitations

• Lacking scientific rigor and providing little basis for generalization of results to the wider population.
• Researchers’ own subjective feelings may influence the case study (researcher bias).
• Difficult to replicate.
• Time-consuming and expensive.
• The volume of data, together with the time restrictions in place, impacted the depth of analysis that was possible within the available resources.

Because a case study deals with only one person/event/group, we can never be sure if the case study investigated is representative of the wider body of “similar” instances. This means the conclusions drawn from a particular case may not be transferable to other settings.

Because case studies are based on the analysis of qualitative (i.e., descriptive) data , a lot depends on the psychologist’s interpretation of the information she has acquired.

This means that there is a lot of scope for Anna O , and it could be that the subjective opinions of the psychologist intrude in the assessment of what the data means.

For example, Freud has been criticized for producing case studies in which the information was sometimes distorted to fit particular behavioral theories (e.g., Little Hans ).

This is also true of Money’s interpretation of the Bruce/Brenda case study (Diamond, 1997) when he ignored evidence that went against his theory.

Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1895).  Studies on hysteria . Standard Edition 2: London.

Curtiss, S. (1981). Genie: The case of a modern wild child .

Diamond, M., & Sigmundson, K. (1997). Sex Reassignment at Birth: Long-term Review and Clinical Implications. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine , 151(3), 298-304

Freud, S. (1909a). Analysis of a phobia of a five year old boy. In The Pelican Freud Library (1977), Vol 8, Case Histories 1, pages 169-306

Freud, S. (1909b). Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose (Der “Rattenmann”). Jb. psychoanal. psychopathol. Forsch ., I, p. 357-421; GW, VII, p. 379-463; Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis, SE , 10: 151-318.

Harlow J. M. (1848). Passage of an iron rod through the head.  Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 39 , 389–393.

Harlow, J. M. (1868).  Recovery from the Passage of an Iron Bar through the Head .  Publications of the Massachusetts Medical Society. 2  (3), 327-347.

Money, J., & Ehrhardt, A. A. (1972).  Man & Woman, Boy & Girl : The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Money, J., & Tucker, P. (1975). Sexual signatures: On being a man or a woman.

Further Information

• Case Study Approach
• Case Study Method
• Enhancing the Quality of Case Studies in Health Services Research
• “We do things together” A case study of “couplehood” in dementia
• Using mixed methods for evaluating an integrative approach to cancer care: a case study

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Pivoting to Meet the Moment: A Case Study of Community Organizing Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

In 2019, Community Catalyst launched a project in partnership with three advocacy organizations aimed at organizing their local communities, primarily communities of color, to influence health systems to be more responsive to community needs.

With support from Community Catalyst, they sought to: identify a community-driven policy agenda; work with local health care institutions to strengthen community engagement; and advance public policies that support community engagement in health care.

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted both the relationships each organization had with health systems and the way they could organize their communities.

Additionally, the movement in support of Black lives opened new opportunities for more explicit conversations about racial justice and health equity. Each organization adapted its work to address the emerging crises in their communities, and Community Catalyst supported partners’ strategies to be both flexible and resilient in responding to community needs.

While the specific details and milestones of each project changed, each partner successfully forged deep relationships with community members, other community-based organizations, and health systems.

This case study highlights community resilience and illustrates the importance of adapting projects — including project funding — to enable organizations to respond to community priorities, especially among indigenous, immigrant, AAPI, Latinx, low-income and justice-involved communities.

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• Volume 21, Issue 1
• What is a case study?
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• Roberta Heale 1 ,
• Alison Twycross 2
• 1 School of Nursing , Laurentian University , Sudbury , Ontario , Canada
• 2 School of Health and Social Care , London South Bank University , London , UK
• Correspondence to Dr Roberta Heale, School of Nursing, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON P3E2C6, Canada; rheale{at}laurentian.ca

https://doi.org/10.1136/eb-2017-102845

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What is it?

Case study is a research methodology, typically seen in social and life sciences. There is no one definition of case study research. 1 However, very simply… ‘a case study can be defined as an intensive study about a person, a group of people or a unit, which is aimed to generalize over several units’. 1 A case study has also been described as an intensive, systematic investigation of a single individual, group, community or some other unit in which the researcher examines in-depth data relating to several variables. 2

Often there are several similar cases to consider such as educational or social service programmes that are delivered from a number of locations. Although similar, they are complex and have unique features. In these circumstances, the evaluation of several, similar cases will provide a better answer to a research question than if only one case is examined, hence the multiple-case study. Stake asserts that the cases are grouped and viewed as one entity, called the quintain . 6  ‘We study what is similar and different about the cases to understand the quintain better’. 6

The steps when using case study methodology are the same as for other types of research. 6 The first step is defining the single case or identifying a group of similar cases that can then be incorporated into a multiple-case study. A search to determine what is known about the case(s) is typically conducted. This may include a review of the literature, grey literature, media, reports and more, which serves to establish a basic understanding of the cases and informs the development of research questions. Data in case studies are often, but not exclusively, qualitative in nature. In multiple-case studies, analysis within cases and across cases is conducted. Themes arise from the analyses and assertions about the cases as a whole, or the quintain, emerge. 6

Benefits and limitations of case studies

If a researcher wants to study a specific phenomenon arising from a particular entity, then a single-case study is warranted and will allow for a in-depth understanding of the single phenomenon and, as discussed above, would involve collecting several different types of data. This is illustrated in example 1 below.

Using a multiple-case research study allows for a more in-depth understanding of the cases as a unit, through comparison of similarities and differences of the individual cases embedded within the quintain. Evidence arising from multiple-case studies is often stronger and more reliable than from single-case research. Multiple-case studies allow for more comprehensive exploration of research questions and theory development. 6

Despite the advantages of case studies, there are limitations. The sheer volume of data is difficult to organise and data analysis and integration strategies need to be carefully thought through. There is also sometimes a temptation to veer away from the research focus. 2 Reporting of findings from multiple-case research studies is also challenging at times, 1 particularly in relation to the word limits for some journal papers.

Examples of case studies

Example 1: nurses’ paediatric pain management practices.

One of the authors of this paper (AT) has used a case study approach to explore nurses’ paediatric pain management practices. This involved collecting several datasets:

Observational data to gain a picture about actual pain management practices.

Questionnaire data about nurses’ knowledge about paediatric pain management practices and how well they felt they managed pain in children.

Questionnaire data about how critical nurses perceived pain management tasks to be.

These datasets were analysed separately and then compared 7–9 and demonstrated that nurses’ level of theoretical did not impact on the quality of their pain management practices. 7 Nor did individual nurse’s perceptions of how critical a task was effect the likelihood of them carrying out this task in practice. 8 There was also a difference in self-reported and observed practices 9 ; actual (observed) practices did not confirm to best practice guidelines, whereas self-reported practices tended to.

Example 2: quality of care for complex patients at Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinics (NPLCs)

The other author of this paper (RH) has conducted a multiple-case study to determine the quality of care for patients with complex clinical presentations in NPLCs in Ontario, Canada. 10 Five NPLCs served as individual cases that, together, represented the quatrain. Three types of data were collected including:

Review of documentation related to the NPLC model (media, annual reports, research articles, grey literature and regulatory legislation).

Interviews with nurse practitioners (NPs) practising at the five NPLCs to determine their perceptions of the impact of the NPLC model on the quality of care provided to patients with multimorbidity.

Chart audits conducted at the five NPLCs to determine the extent to which evidence-based guidelines were followed for patients with diabetes and at least one other chronic condition.

The three sources of data collected from the five NPLCs were analysed and themes arose related to the quality of care for complex patients at NPLCs. The multiple-case study confirmed that nurse practitioners are the primary care providers at the NPLCs, and this positively impacts the quality of care for patients with multimorbidity. Healthcare policy, such as lack of an increase in salary for NPs for 10 years, has resulted in issues in recruitment and retention of NPs at NPLCs. This, along with insufficient resources in the communities where NPLCs are located and high patient vulnerability at NPLCs, have a negative impact on the quality of care. 10

These examples illustrate how collecting data about a single case or multiple cases helps us to better understand the phenomenon in question. Case study methodology serves to provide a framework for evaluation and analysis of complex issues. It shines a light on the holistic nature of nursing practice and offers a perspective that informs improved patient care.

• Gustafsson J
• Calanzaro M
• Sandelowski M

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

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Transformative Community Planning: Empowerment Through Community Development

Prepared for the 1996 Planners Network Conference, “Renewing Hope, Restoring Vision: Progressive Planning in Our Communities.”

by Marie Kennedy

INTRODUCTION

What is community development?

I see real community development as combining material development with the development of people. Real development, as I understand it, necessarily involves increasing a community’s capacity for taking control of its own development–building within the community critical thinking and planning abilities, as well as concrete skills, so that development projects and planning processes can be replicated by community members in the future. A good planning project should leave a community not just with more immediate “products”–e.g., housing–but also with an increased capacity to meet future needs.

Effective community development planning takes a comprehensive approach to meeting community needs–an approach that recognizes the interrelationship of economic, physical and social development. Community development is linked to empowerment and to valuing diversity of cultures. This is true whether you are talking about planning in materially underdeveloped communities in the United States or in the so-called developing world.

Manning Marable, an African-American scholar and commentator, in his 1992 book, Crisis of Color and Democracy, offers a concise definition of empowerment, one that I think is particularly apt for planners:

Empowerment is essentially a capacity to define clearly one’s interests, and to develop a strategy to achieve those interests. It’s the ability to create a plan or program to change one’s reality in order to obtain those objectives or interests. Power is not a “thing”, it’s a process. In other words, you shouldn’t say that a group has power, but that, through its conscious activity, a group can empower itself by increasing its ability to achieve its own interests.

And, Kari Polanyi Levitt, an economist working in the Caribbean, in a lecture a couple of years ago to the Association of Caribbean Economists, took on the individualism, selfishness and greed typical of what she calls the “market magic” paradigm, arguing that:

Any meaningful notion of “sustainable development” must begin with the recognition that the diversity of cultures which nourish human creativity is as precious an inheritance as the diversity of plant and animal life.

She goes on to say:

Development cannot be imposed from without. It is a creative social process and its central nervous system, the matrix which nourishes it, is located in the cultural sphere. Development is ultimately not a matter of money or physical capital, or foreign exchange, but of the capacity of a society to tap the root of popular creativity, to free up and empower people to exercise their intelligence and collective wisdom.

Role of the planner

Most of my experience has been on the community level and it’s at this level that you will find most of the practitioners who are trying to work in a transformative way. However, what often blocks success for transformative planners at the community level are decisions taken by planners at the city, state, national or even international level. For transformative planning to work on the community level, planners at all levels, who are framing public problem definitions and policies, writing legislation, designing governmental programs, prioritizing funding targets for private foundations and governmental agencies, or preparing requests for proposals, have to share an understanding of what constitutes community development.

Measuring success

If, on the other hand, we have a different version of what constitutes success:

• a version that does include products of development, but which rests primarily on power and control being increasingly vested in community members;
• success that is measured by the number of people who have, in the planning process, moved from being an object of planning to being a subject;
• success measured in terms of increasing numbers of confident, competent, cooperative and purposeful community members;
• success measured in terms of the ability of people involved in the planning process to replicate their achievements in other situations;
• success measured in terms of movement towards realizing values of equity and inclusion;

then, we’re going to have very different sorts of policies, programs and practices. And, our roles as planners will also be very different. This latter type of practice is what I want to discuss with you today.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Advocacy planning

Advocacy planning developed within the context of the burgeoning popular movements of the ’60’s–foremost of which was the Civil Rights Movement and from which grew other movements. Of particular importance to advocacy planning were those primarily localized movements that focused on the urban crisis, and the student movement which demanded relevance in education to social issues, including those connected to the urban crisis. The ’60’s also saw the real cranking up of urban renewal which concentrated on renewing failing downtowns in order to save our cities (if not our people) and, somewhat later, developing some neighborhoods through gentrification while using other neighborhoods as the dumping grounds for the displaced.

Within this context, planners often came under attack by the community–and by students for that matter–because planners were often amongst the professionals that made the decisions that caused neighborhoods to be uprooted, that caused communities to be destroyed. Progressive planners and students began to look at which groups had access to professional assistance and which did not–it began to occur to us that in working for the interests that could afford to pay us–whether private or governmental–we were in essence advocating the interests of that group–in fact, we came to understand that all planning is advocacy for one set of interests or another. Pushed hard by students and by low-income community groups we had to recognize that even public planners didn’t operate in a neutral way, in spite of the avowed purpose of city, state and federal planning agencies to serve the supposedly neutral public interest. On the contrary, low-income communities in particular couldn’t depend on publicly-paid planners to represent their interests. Communities which were not part of the power bloc that elected and kept various politicians in office, communities which differed in terms of class, race, gender, whatever, from that power bloc, could pretty much depend on being embattled with public planning agencies.

Recognizing these contradictions, progressive planners across the country began to put their skills at the disposal of groups and interests which hadn’t previously had access to their services. Across the country advocacy planning groups sprang up like the San Francisco Design Center, the Architects’ Renewal Committee of Harlem, the Pratt Center and Boston’s Urban Planning Aid (where I worked for a time in the early ’70’s). In response to student demands for experience in grappling with real urban problems, these models were simultaneously extended into schools of planning and architecture.

The advocacy planning movement reached its peak in the late ’60’s, early ’70’s and had largely died out by the late ’70’s, at least in terms of being a movement. There are certainly aspects of the practice that have been institutionalized and people still practice as advocate planners, but without the sense of a movement.

In the movement we made some real contributions, the benefits of which are still felt. I would identify four:

• First, and most importantly, advocacy planning began to successfully challenge the notion of planning as a “neutral science,” as apolitical–removed from the political process. In my view, the break with this technocratic approach was incomplete, but this assessment doesn’t invalidate the importance of these first steps that advocacy planning took in the direction of recognizing planning as political.
• Secondly, advocacy planning made great strides in institutionalizing the notion of community participation in planning, at least planning in the public sphere. Today, nearly everyone in the US takes this for granted and in most publicly supported planning, at least lip service is paid to citizen participation in the planning process. But, this wasn’t always true, and it was something that had to be won. Although participation can be used in a negative way–as a smokescreen to obscure real power relations and agendas, the fact that we have a right to that citizen participation provides an important opening for struggle.
• Third, I would count the human legacy of advocacy planning as very important–many of us still active in community development work had our ideas and careers forged in the advocacy planning movement.
• And, fourth, the contribution to planning education. The approach to education that includes hands-on field projects with underserved groups is a direct legacy of advocacy planning. Advocacy planning is an important thread of today’s transformative community development planning–but, there were significant shortfalls in the vision offered by advocacy planning. Today’s debates on the US left about what planning practice should be are connected to these shortfalls.

Overall, we failed to effectively frame technical assistance in relationship to people’s movements in such a way as to build those movements. In my view, planning should feed organizing–it shouldn’t be planning at the expense of organizing, which was often the case in advocacy planning.

We didn’t sufficiently take into account how communities are situated in a larger societal and historic context. We didn’t often evaluate the direction of evolution of communities with which we worked, questioning, for example, whether a particular community was developing towards or away from realizing values of inclusion and liberation. Consequently, we didn’t effectively target our assistance to particular communities and issues.

We took groups too much at their own self-definition of goals; we didn’t work hard enough perhaps to expand the world view of oppressed people, to explicitly counter the ideological oppression which shapes the way in which people think. This populist/majoritarian approach caused us to choose short term victories over the slower process of building a broader vision of the good community. Particularly in working with white communities around their perceived interests, we ran the risk (and sometimes fell into the trap) of supporting essentially exclusionary and racist organizing. At best, the narrow vision of short term and expedient goals meant that groups with whom we worked frequently fell apart when limited goals were achieved.

We also failed to sufficiently expand our notion of what the field of planning includes–this meant a continuing focus on the product, often a physical product and tactics that related to that like producing alternative site plans or fixing up buildings…basically emphasizing the built product, not the movement. Often we didn’t change our planning methodologies at all from those we had been using in more traditional practice. We didn’t really retool for a new practice–we mostly just changed who got access to our services. The political act was in the choice of client, not in developing a different way of working with people–a new process of planning. This is an important area in which the break with the notion of planning as an objective, neutral science was incomplete.

This led us to have a confused notion of what participation in and control over planning decisions meant–did it mean that everybody was a planner? Or did it mean just a token participation at the fringes? We went in both directions, sometimes simultaneously. We didn’t figure out very well how to work in a way that created frameworks for meaningful decisionmaking while allowing organizers to be organizers, neighborhood residents to get on with their lives, and for us to be planners.

Our practice as advocate planners remained primarily representational, rather than participatory. Communities remained the object of planning and rarely did our practice assist their transformation into becoming simultaneously the subject and object of planning.

TRANSFORMATIVE POPULISM VS REDISTRIBUTIVE POPULISM

A comparison of two progressive approaches to planning and organizing

In important ways, the redistributive approach, as we describe it, is an unevolved advocacy planning. This contrasts to the transformative approach which, while it evolves from advocacy planning, adds many other threads from, for example, national liberation struggles and participatory action research.

Redistributive planning, although concerned with economic justice, with redistributing wealth, doesn’t seek, in the main part, to support organizing focused on the redistribution of power and it doesn’t aim to cede control over planning decisions to oppressed people. The model assumes that the repository of knowledge is in the planners. It’s “we’ll figure out what’s best to do and do it for you” not “we’ll help you do it.”

Furthermore, although redistributive planners frequently have a critical analysis of the structural nature of social and urban problems, they will support organizing that focuses on issues “where the people are at” rather than trying to take up some of the hard questions such as race. In part this is because the “where the people are at” kind of issues translate more readily into products that are recognizable as legitimate results of a planning process.

Redistributive planning rests on the assumption that community development will proceed incrementally through solving one problem after another and eventually this will mean a qualitative social change. Redistributive planners will often verbalize the same long range and overall goals as transformative or community development planners, but they concentrate on products over process and on efficiency in reaching product-oriented goals over mobilization and empowerment.

Both redistributive and transformative planners would acknowledge that there is a political nature to all we do and that all of our work has implications for the distribution of power in society and that there is no such thing as value-free social science. However, while redistributive populism reserves this awareness to the planner/organizer, transformative populism requires that the raising of political consciousness is a necessary corollary to any successful planning process.

Links to participatory action research

How knowledge is produced is a great mystery to most folks. Knowledge has become a product bought and sold. In general, ordinary people aren’t considered knowledgeable, even about their own reality. The research industry has become more and more specialized and hidden behind a technocratic veil of supposed “scientific method,” which effectively excludes laypeople. Conditioned to believe they can’t adequately understand their own lives and cut out of participation in research and analysis which might enhance their understanding, ordinary people often simply stop trying. And, in truth, people do often lack the information, skills and experience to critically understand the roots of their powerlessness. Their lack of information and their preoccupation with daily survival interferes with their understanding of how power structures work and affect their lives. Therefore, the oppressed often share the oppressors’ viewpoint, blaming themselves for their own poverty and powerlessness–essentially what we know as “internalized oppression.”

So, here’s a central dilemma for the transformative planner–finding a balance between assuming that oppressed people fully understand their own oppression and the planner does not, or conversely, that the planner fully understands the truth (or has the research and analytical tools to get at the truth) about people’s oppression and that the people do not.

The process of achieving this balance isn’t mystical, but it does require an ongoing process of evaluation of the actual circumstances in each community planning project undertaken. And, it requires a real commitment to community development as I outlined at the beginning of this paper.

Balancing the roles of the planner and the community

Correcting for biases, preconceptions and confusing preferences for correctness

Historically, planners have cloaked their preferences–typically those of white, middle-class men–in lots of big words and scientific method and called them “right.” That accounts for a lot of the most disastrous planning projects of the past and it continues today. If you’ve studied the early days of urban renewal, you’ve probably read some of the sociological, psychological and planning studies of the West End of Boston–the second massive clearance urban renewal project in Boston–generally conceded to be a disaster–an area seen as a slum by the planners, but seen as a thriving multi-ethnic community by residents. Who gets to say an area is a slum? (I should note that while the planners who did this were liberals, progressives aren’t immune to this type of narrow vision either.)

Several years ago, over a period of a year, I was in a discussion group every week or so with a group of homeless or previously homeless women. I learned a great deal that is critical of well-intentioned shelter policies. Many have a hard time understanding why, even in winter, some homeless people opt to stay on the street rather than going to a shelter. The homeless women are organizing themselves against the shelters–shelters which were developed by the most well-intentioned, even progressive, people, I’m sure. They also had critical things to say about the attitudes towards homeless that were reflected in rehousing policies–policies that implied that homeless people have no community, have no legitimate preferences in housing accommodations, that they should be grateful for whatever they can get. This comes from planners, however, progressive, focusing only on the housing unit and not on the sense of community and self-dignity of the homeless themselves. For example, a now discredited policy of the City of Cambridge was to rehouse Cambridge homeless several cities away in Lynn where there were cheaper and more units available. If a homeless person didn’t accept this relocation (and many didn’t), they were bumped to the bottom of the list–after all, they had been offered housing.

Successful transformative planning means extending our definition of the planning process to include a capacity building and education/outreach phase on the front end and an evaluation period on the back end. And, it means fighting for funding for this extended process.

In short, it means working with communities in a way that’s sensitive, supportive, inquiring and carefully analytical, challenging but not directive or patronizing. Although this may sound like “mom and apple pie,” it’s all too rare in practice.

This paper has been presented in various versions in lectures at Cornell University (September 1993), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (May 1993), and the Grupo Para el Desarollo Integral de la Capital, Havana, Cuba (July 1992). Published versions are forthcoming in  New Solutions  (summer 1996) and  Indigenous Planning Times  (fall 1996).

Marie Kennedy teaches community planning at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

• Case Study Evaluation Approach
• Learning Center

A case study evaluation approach can be an incredibly powerful tool for monitoring and evaluating complex programs and policies. By identifying common themes and patterns, this approach allows us to better understand the successes and challenges faced by the program. In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of using a case study evaluation approach in the monitoring and evaluation of projects, programs, and public policies.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Case Study Evaluation Approach

The advantages of a case study evaluation approach, types of case studies, potential challenges with a case study evaluation approach, guiding principles for successful implementation of a case study evaluation approach.

• Benefits of Incorporating the Case Study Evaluation Approach in the Monitoring and Evaluation of Projects and Programs

A case study evaluation approach is a great way to gain an in-depth understanding of a particular issue or situation. This type of approach allows the researcher to observe, analyze, and assess the effects of a particular situation on individuals or groups.

An individual, a location, or a project may serve as the focal point of a case study’s attention. Quantitative and qualitative data are frequently used in conjunction with one another.

It also allows the researcher to gain insights into how people react to external influences. By using a case study evaluation approach, researchers can gain insights into how certain factors such as policy change or a new technology have impacted individuals and communities. The data gathered through this approach can be used to formulate effective strategies for responding to changes and challenges. Ultimately, this monitoring and evaluation approach helps organizations make better decision about the implementation of their plans.

This approach can be used to assess the effectiveness of a policy, program, or initiative by considering specific elements such as implementation processes, outcomes, and impact. A case study evaluation approach can provide an in-depth understanding of the effectiveness of a program by closely examining the processes involved in its implementation. This includes understanding the context, stakeholders, and resources to gain insight into how well a program is functioning or has been executed. By evaluating these elements, it can help to identify areas for improvement and suggest potential solutions. The findings from this approach can then be used to inform decisions about policies, programs, and initiatives for improved outcomes.

It is also useful for determining if other policies, programs, or initiatives could be applied to similar situations in order to achieve similar results or improved outcomes. All in all, the case study monitoring evaluation approach is an effective method for determining the effectiveness of specific policies, programs, or initiatives. By researching and analyzing the successes of previous cases, this approach can be used to identify similar approaches that could be applied to similar situations in order to achieve similar results or improved outcomes.

A case study evaluation approach offers the advantage of providing in-depth insight into a particular program or policy. This can be accomplished by analyzing data and observations collected from a range of stakeholders such as program participants, service providers, and community members. The monitoring and evaluation approach is used to assess the impact of programs and inform the decision-making process to ensure successful implementation. The case study monitoring and evaluation approach can help identify any underlying issues that need to be addressed in order to improve program effectiveness. It also provides a reality check on how successful programs are actually working, allowing organizations to make adjustments as needed. Overall, a case study monitoring and evaluation approach helps to ensure that policies and programs are achieving their objectives while providing valuable insight into how they are performing overall.

By taking a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis, case study evaluations are able to capture nuances in the context of a particular program or policy that can be overlooked when relying solely on quantitative methods. Using this approach, insights can be gleaned from looking at the individual experiences and perspectives of actors involved, providing a more detailed understanding of the impact of the program or policy than is possible with other evaluation methodologies. As such, case study monitoring evaluation is an invaluable tool in assessing the effectiveness of a particular initiative, enabling more informed decision-making as well as more effective implementation of programs and policies.

Furthermore, this approach is an effective way to uncover experiential information that can help to inform the ongoing improvement of policy and programming over time All in all, the case study monitoring evaluation approach offers an effective way to uncover experiential information necessary to inform the ongoing improvement of policy and programming. By analyzing the data gathered from this systematic approach, stakeholders can gain deeper insight into how best to make meaningful and long-term changes in their respective organizations.

Case studies come in a variety of forms, each of which can be put to a unique set of evaluation tasks. Evaluators have come to a consensus on describing six distinct sorts of case studies, which are as follows: illustrative, exploratory, critical instance, program implementation, program effects, and cumulative.

Illustrative Case Study

An illustrative case study is a type of case study that is used to provide a detailed and descriptive account of a particular event, situation, or phenomenon. It is often used in research to provide a clear understanding of a complex issue, and to illustrate the practical application of theories or concepts.

An illustrative case study typically uses qualitative data, such as interviews, surveys, or observations, to provide a detailed account of the unit being studied. The case study may also include quantitative data, such as statistics or numerical measurements, to provide additional context or to support the qualitative data.

The goal of an illustrative case study is to provide a rich and detailed description of the unit being studied, and to use this information to illustrate broader themes or concepts. For example, an illustrative case study of a successful community development project may be used to illustrate the importance of community engagement and collaboration in achieving development goals.

One of the strengths of an illustrative case study is its ability to provide a detailed and nuanced understanding of a particular issue or phenomenon. By focusing on a single case, the researcher is able to provide a detailed and in-depth analysis that may not be possible through other research methods.

However, one limitation of an illustrative case study is that the findings may not be generalizable to other contexts or populations. Because the case study focuses on a single unit, it may not be representative of other similar units or situations.

A well-executed case study can shed light on wider research topics or concepts through its thorough and descriptive analysis of a specific event or phenomenon.

Exploratory Case Study

An exploratory case study is a type of case study that is used to investigate a new or previously unexplored phenomenon or issue. It is often used in research when the topic is relatively unknown or when there is little existing literature on the topic.

Exploratory case studies are typically qualitative in nature and use a variety of methods to collect data, such as interviews, observations, and document analysis. The focus of the study is to gather as much information as possible about the phenomenon being studied and to identify new and emerging themes or patterns.

The goal of an exploratory case study is to provide a foundation for further research and to generate hypotheses about the phenomenon being studied. By exploring the topic in-depth, the researcher can identify new areas of research and generate new questions to guide future research.

One of the strengths of an exploratory case study is its ability to provide a rich and detailed understanding of a new or emerging phenomenon. By using a variety of data collection methods, the researcher can gather a broad range of data and perspectives to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon being studied.

However, one limitation of an exploratory case study is that the findings may not be generalizable to other contexts or populations. Because the study is focused on a new or previously unexplored phenomenon, the findings may not be applicable to other situations or populations.

Exploratory case studies are an effective research strategy for learning about novel occurrences, developing research hypotheses, and gaining a deep familiarity with a topic of study.

Critical Instance Case Study

A critical instance case study is a type of case study that focuses on a specific event or situation that is critical to understanding a broader issue or phenomenon. The goal of a critical instance case study is to analyze the event in depth and to draw conclusions about the broader issue or phenomenon based on the analysis.

A critical instance case study typically uses qualitative data, such as interviews, observations, or document analysis, to provide a detailed and nuanced understanding of the event being studied. The data are analyzed using various methods, such as content analysis or thematic analysis, to identify patterns and themes that emerge from the data.

The critical instance case study is often used in research when a particular event or situation is critical to understanding a broader issue or phenomenon. For example, a critical instance case study of a successful disaster response effort may be used to identify key factors that contributed to the success of the response, and to draw conclusions about effective disaster response strategies more broadly.

One of the strengths of a critical instance case study is its ability to provide a detailed and in-depth analysis of a particular event or situation. By focusing on a critical instance, the researcher is able to provide a rich and nuanced understanding of the event, and to draw conclusions about broader issues or phenomena based on the analysis.

However, one limitation of a critical instance case study is that the findings may not be generalizable to other contexts or populations. Because the case study focuses on a specific event or situation, the findings may not be applicable to other similar events or situations.

A critical instance case study is a valuable research method that can provide a detailed and nuanced understanding of a particular event or situation and can be used to draw conclusions about broader issues or phenomena based on the analysis.

Program Implementation Program Implementation

A program implementation case study is a type of case study that focuses on the implementation of a particular program or intervention. The goal of the case study is to provide a detailed and comprehensive account of the program implementation process, and to identify factors that contributed to the success or failure of the program.

Program implementation case studies typically use qualitative data, such as interviews, observations, and document analysis, to provide a detailed and nuanced understanding of the program implementation process. The data are analyzed using various methods, such as content analysis or thematic analysis, to identify patterns and themes that emerge from the data.

The program implementation case study is often used in research to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular program or intervention, and to identify strategies for improving program implementation in the future. For example, a program implementation case study of a school-based health program may be used to identify key factors that contributed to the success or failure of the program, and to make recommendations for improving program implementation in similar settings.

One of the strengths of a program implementation case study is its ability to provide a detailed and comprehensive account of the program implementation process. By using qualitative data, the researcher is able to capture the complexity and nuance of the implementation process, and to identify factors that may not be captured by quantitative data alone.

However, one limitation of a program implementation case study is that the findings may not be generalizable to other contexts or populations. Because the case study focuses on a specific program or intervention, the findings may not be applicable to other programs or interventions in different settings.

An effective research tool, a case study of program implementation may illuminate the intricacies of the implementation process and point the way towards future enhancements.

Program Effects Case Study

A program effects case study is a research method that evaluates the effectiveness of a particular program or intervention by examining its outcomes or effects. The purpose of this type of case study is to provide a detailed and comprehensive account of the program’s impact on its intended participants or target population.

A program effects case study typically employs both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods, such as surveys, interviews, and observations, to evaluate the program’s impact on the target population. The data is then analyzed using statistical and thematic analysis to identify patterns and themes that emerge from the data.

The program effects case study is often used to evaluate the success of a program and identify areas for improvement. For example, a program effects case study of a community-based HIV prevention program may evaluate the program’s effectiveness in reducing HIV transmission rates among high-risk populations and identify factors that contributed to the program’s success.

One of the strengths of a program effects case study is its ability to provide a detailed and nuanced understanding of a program’s impact on its intended participants or target population. By using both quantitative and qualitative data, the researcher can capture both the objective and subjective outcomes of the program and identify factors that may have contributed to the outcomes.

However, a limitation of the program effects case study is that it may not be generalizable to other populations or contexts. Since the case study focuses on a particular program and population, the findings may not be applicable to other programs or populations in different settings.

A program effects case study is a good way to do research because it can give a detailed look at how a program affects the people it is meant for. This kind of case study can be used to figure out what needs to be changed and how to make programs that work better.

Cumulative Case Study

A cumulative case study is a type of case study that involves the collection and analysis of multiple cases to draw broader conclusions. Unlike a single-case study, which focuses on one specific case, a cumulative case study combines multiple cases to provide a more comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon.

The purpose of a cumulative case study is to build up a body of evidence through the examination of multiple cases. The cases are typically selected to represent a range of variations or perspectives on the phenomenon of interest. Data is collected from each case using a range of methods, such as interviews, surveys, and observations.

The data is then analyzed across cases to identify common themes, patterns, and trends. The analysis may involve both qualitative and quantitative methods, such as thematic analysis and statistical analysis.

The cumulative case study is often used in research to develop and test theories about a phenomenon. For example, a cumulative case study of successful community-based health programs may be used to identify common factors that contribute to program success, and to develop a theory about effective community-based health program design.

One of the strengths of the cumulative case study is its ability to draw on a range of cases to build a more comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon. By examining multiple cases, the researcher can identify patterns and trends that may not be evident in a single case study. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon and helps to develop more robust theories.

However, one limitation of the cumulative case study is that it can be time-consuming and resource-intensive to collect and analyze data from multiple cases. Additionally, the selection of cases may introduce bias if the cases are not representative of the population of interest.

In summary, a cumulative case study is a valuable research method that can provide a more comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon by examining multiple cases. This type of case study is particularly useful for developing and testing theories and identifying common themes and patterns across cases.

When conducting a case study evaluation approach, one of the main challenges is the need to establish a contextually relevant research design that accounts for the unique factors of the case being studied. This requires close monitoring of the case, its environment, and relevant stakeholders. In addition, the researcher must build a framework for the collection and analysis of data that is able to draw meaningful conclusions and provide valid insights into the dynamics of the case. Ultimately, an effective case study monitoring evaluation approach will allow researchers to form an accurate understanding of their research subject.

Additionally, depending on the size and scope of the case, there may be concerns regarding the availability of resources and personnel that could be allocated to data collection and analysis. To address these issues, a case study monitoring evaluation approach can be adopted, which would involve a mix of different methods such as interviews, surveys, focus groups and document reviews. Such an approach could provide valuable insights into the effectiveness and implementation of the case in question. Additionally, this type of evaluation can be tailored to the specific needs of the case study to ensure that all relevant data is collected and respected.

When dealing with a highly sensitive or confidential subject matter within a case study, researchers must take extra measures to prevent bias during data collection as well as protect participant anonymity while also collecting valid data in order to ensure reliable results

Moreover, when conducting a case study evaluation it is important to consider the potential implications of the data gathered. By taking extra measures to prevent bias and protect participant anonymity, researchers can ensure reliable results while also collecting valid data. Maintaining confidentiality and deploying ethical research practices are essential when conducting a case study to ensure an unbiased and accurate monitoring evaluation.

When planning and implementing a case study evaluation approach, it is important to ensure the guiding principles of research quality, data collection, and analysis are met. To ensure these principles are upheld, it is essential to develop a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation plan. This plan should clearly outline the steps to be taken during the data collection and analysis process. Furthermore, the plan should provide detailed descriptions of the project objectives, target population, key indicators, and timeline. It is also important to include metrics or benchmarks to monitor progress and identify any potential areas for improvement. By implementing such an approach, it will be possible to ensure that the case study evaluation approach yields valid and reliable results.

To ensure successful implementation, it is essential to establish a reliable data collection process that includes detailed information such as the scope of the study, the participants involved, and the methods used to collect data. Additionally, it is important to have a clear understanding of what will be examined through the evaluation process and how the results will be used. All in all, it is essential to establish a sound monitoring evaluation approach for a successful case study implementation. This includes creating a reliable data collection process that encompasses the scope of the study, the participants involved, and the methods used to collect data. It is also imperative to have an understanding of what will be examined and how the results will be utilized. Ultimately, effective planning is key to ensure that the evaluation process yields meaningful insights.

Benefits of Incorporating the Case Study Evaluation Approach in the Monitoring and Evaluation of Projects and Programmes

Using a case study approach in monitoring and evaluation allows for a more detailed and in-depth exploration of the project’s success, helping to identify key areas of improvement and successes that may have been overlooked through traditional evaluation. Through this case study method, specific data can be collected and analyzed to identify trends and different perspectives that can support the evaluation process. This data can allow stakeholders to gain a better understanding of the project’s successes and failures, helping them make informed decisions on how to strengthen current activities or shape future initiatives. From a monitoring and evaluation standpoint, this approach can provide an increased level of accuracy in terms of accurately assessing the effectiveness of the project.

This can provide valuable insights into what works—and what doesn’t—when it comes to implementing projects and programs, aiding decision-makers in making future plans that better meet their objectives However, monitoring and evaluation is just one approach to assessing the success of a case study. It does provide a useful insight into what initiatives may be successful, but it is important to note that there are other effective research methods, such as surveys and interviews, that can also help to further evaluate the success of a project or program.

In conclusion, a case study evaluation approach can be incredibly useful in monitoring and evaluating complex programs and policies. By exploring key themes, patterns and relationships, organizations can gain a detailed understanding of the successes, challenges and limitations of their program or policy. This understanding can then be used to inform decision-making and improve outcomes for those involved. With its ability to provide an in-depth understanding of a program or policy, the case study evaluation approach has become an invaluable tool for monitoring and evaluation professionals.

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• Open access
• Published: 09 August 2022

Social values and sustainable development: community experiences

• Walter Leal Filho   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1241-5225 1 , 13 ,
• Vanessa Levesque   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2965-3545 2 ,
• Subarna Sivapalan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6318-5637 3 ,
• Amanda Lange Salvia   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0346-1270 4 ,
• Barbara Fritzen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4549-7685 4 ,
• Ronald Deckert   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7329-8755 5 ,
• Valerija Kozlova   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5639-6396 6 ,
• Todd Jared LeVasseur   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7049-3021 7 ,
• Kay Emblen-Perry   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8841-650X 8 ,
• Ulisses M. Azeiteiro   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5252-1700 9 ,
• Arminda Paço   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2806-4247 10 ,
• Bruno Borsari   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9463-333X 11 &
• Chris Shiel 12  

Environmental Sciences Europe volume  34 , Article number:  67 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Metrics details

This paper presents a review of the literature and trends related to social values and sustainable development and describes a set of case studies from a variety of community-based projects which illustrate the advantages that social values bring about as part of efforts to promote sustainability. Three approaches were used to develop this study: a bibliometric analysis of the topic “social values and sustainable development”, an analysis of case studies that concretely present community projects addressing social values and sustainability, and the development of a framework linking up bibliometric clusters and the cases studies.

While the bibliometric analysis revealed clusters where social values are strongly connected with sustainable development, the case studies indicated the lack of a common terminology and understanding of the relation between social values, sustainable development, and community-based projects.

Conclusions

The study concludes by suggesting a set of measures that could be deployed to better take social values into account when planning policies or making decisions related to community projects.

Introduction

September 2015 marked a significant milestone for the people, planet, and prosperity. It was during this historic occasion that United Nations Member States collectively agreed upon the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The adoption of the SDGs would see the global population come together to realize the urgent call for action to end poverty, safeguard the planet, and ensure peace and prosperity. The SDGs consist of 17 interlinked global goals that are designed to serve as a blueprint to achieve a more sustainable future for the global community, addressing among others, critical issues such as poverty, quality education, climate change, clean water and sanitation, partnerships, and sustainable communities. The emphasis of the SDGs and Agenda 2030 on addressing the dimensions of people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership is the further assertion that these aspects are crucial to the future of humanity and the planet [ 56 ].

Agenda 2030 and the SDGs are essentially a socially driven agenda, projecting—social values and trajectories. To be able to better understand the place of values within the sustainability debate, there is first a need to define social values in this context. From a sociological perspective, values are considered the foundation for the spurring of human actions. Values are also deemed to be instrumental in the development of an individual’s personal and collective identities, besides being a vital conduit for social integration [ 54 ], while being appreciated by those focused on sustainable business. According to the organization Impact [ 29 ], a social value is seen as a strategic and achievable process that involves impacting societies positively, regardless of an entity’s financial status, business direction, or size.

In a sustainable development context, values are often considered in the assessment of communities classified as vulnerable [ 51 ]. Under-development, environmental ethics, and preservation of social and cultural traditions are but some of the prevalent issues explored in the literature on this subject matter [ 57 ]. Development has had an impact on the economy and the environment. This situation generates a critical purpose to investigate, while defining and evaluating the value of development, particularly from a social stance [ 25 ].

Social values never occur in a vacuum. We are socialized into pre-existing yet malleable conceptions of community and social relations [ 28 , 40 ]. At the same time, there is a tension between autonomy and egotism, the need to create a healthy sense of individual self can conflict with the need to maintain a healthy and coherent community, with established social mores. Historically, human communities have created and policed social values that have privileged the latter—for example the hierarchical “5 great relationships” of Chinese dynasties informed by Confucianism, or the varna (caste) system of India. With the onset of violent European clearances, global colonialism and industrialization, coupled with individual is facilitated by the Protestant Reformation, the strong bonds of community values (that were also patriarchal, heteronormative, and confining for many), were sundered. This inversion of the social order flourished in the post-World War II US economy. It was based on limited affluence where individual consumers became the social model of modernism, establishing a culture that diminished all other relations. This social value of extreme individualism has in large part become globalized and has led the 2000s to anomie, dysnomia, economic crime [ 39 , 44 ], and planetary crises. It has also led to high rates of mental health, suicide, and life dissatisfaction for many, where these factors are compounded by living through environmental devastation brought by the same system of over-consumption and over-population [ 46 ]. It is in this context that the focus on social values related to healing, flourishing, and justice as well as mutual support and a sense of community become central to sustainable development and a social leg of sustainability; which is related to personal growth and being connected [ 28 ]. Therefore, all people could aim at „personal evolvement in the community “ the as English translation of the German expression “Persönliche Entfaltung in Gemeinschaft” [ 14 ], 32).

We point out, though, that social values in support of sustainable development rightfully focus on equity, inclusion, and justice, but more and more data suggest that such values must also focus on and include the natural world and the connection of humans to it, as well [ 53 ]. Additional data indicate that as long as rampant individualism and a strong anthropocentrism tethered to values of over-consumption continue to shape social values and patterns of behaviours [ 33 ], sustainable development will be very hard, if not impossible, to achieve. Thus, the question arises about what social values are being advanced that can promote sustainable development? For example, values that (1) strengthen resilience; (2) support change and transformation; and (3) advance a social basis for these two conditions that may support sustainable development. Values that activate thinking, feelings and actions and that relate to determining benign change [ 49 ] may act to overcome dysfunctional norms and values humans learned to follow in societies and communities.

Interestingly, there has not been much literature focusing on the notions of social values and sustainable development within the context of community experiences [ 22 , 48 ]. Thus, with this paper we aim at creating an avenue to explore these concepts in greater depth. More specifically, we aim to understand the extent to which the notion of social values and sustainable development have been approached and described within literature, to draw out international best practice case study examples showcasing social values and sustainable development within community-based projects, and to develop a framework integrating the best practice case studies and literature analysis.

The theoretical underpinning of our work is a three-pronged framework that considered stakeholder theory to understand how economic value is created and traded, including its links to ethics and capitalism. According to Parmar and his collaborators [ 45 ] this knowledge is necessary to assist entrepreneurs to reflect about management with emphasis on the value of goods and trading practices. Institutional theory instead is a paradigm about the more profound aspects of social structure, that focuses on the processes by which schemes, rules, and norms, become established to guide social behaviour [ 2 ]. The third prong of our framework is the point of convergence of the previous two, consisting of the theory for sustainable development as proposed by Shi and team [ 50 ]. This process is an evolutionary path that began with the single goal of using sustainably Earth’s resources, to Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and most recently, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We first present a review of literature and trends related to social values and sustainable development. Following there is a discussion on a set of case studies from a variety of community-based projects which illustrates the advantages a focus on social values can bring about in promoting sustainable development. Finally, conclusions are made and some measures are listed, which may assist in deploying a better understanding of social values into account, when planning policies, or making decisions on spending, for which the sustainability of specific groups and communities may be jeopardized.

Methodology

We are interested in exploring the context in which community-based projects focused on sustainable development have explicitly assessed and incorporated social values. One method of doing so is to analyse the publications about these topics, to assess the linkages and themes within this research area. Our methodological approach occurred in three main steps:

Step 1: Bibliometric analysis of the topic “social values and sustainable development”.

Step 2: Cases studies that concretely present community projects addressing social values and sustainability.

Step 3: Framework connecting bibliometric clusters and the case studies.

Firstly, we conducted a bibliometric analysis using the software tool VOSviewer. This analysis allowed us to assess scientific investigation by using quantitative studies; it is based on the assumption that the number of citations of an article tends to reflect its impact on the scientific community [ 59 ]. Bibliometric analyses generated information about the quantity and performance of the publications, giving insights into the relations between fields of knowledge by means of the statistical analysis of co-publications and citations [ 47 ].

This bibliometric analysis included peer-reviewed publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). This is one of the most trusted and well-known worldwide citation databases covering multidisciplinary research. The following search string was used: TOPIC: (“social values”) AND TOPIC: (“sustainable development”). All years of the timespan available at WoS were considered (1945–2021). Only studies in English were considered, with no restrictions applied regarding document types. The search was carried out on March 2021 and returned 89 papers. In a second step, the titles and abstracts of the identified papers were checked, in order to validate their relevance and ensure their compatibility with the aims of the study. The exclusion criteria used in the study were: thematic relevance, interdisciplinarity, due emphasis to social science components under the lenses of sustainability. Based on these criteria, 74 articles were chosen for analysis. The co-occurrence analysis was performed in VOSviewer and returned a set of nodes and links. Each node is a frequently used term in the articles (analysed in titles and abstracts) and the size of the node refers to the frequency of the keyword. The distance between two nodes indicates the strength of the relation between the terms; therefore, shorter distances tend to suggest stronger relations [ 37 ]. Linked topics mean they have appeared together, and the link width is proportional to the number of co-occurrences the keywords have [ 37 , 47 ]. The minimum number of occurrences of a keyword was set to 2, resulting in 24 selected keywords. For the process of clustering, where the software grouped closely related nodes in clusters, 2 terms were defined as the minimum number of keywords per cluster and clustering resolution was set to 0.5 (as per the software guidelines, this parameter determines the level of detail of the clustering and must have a non-negative value; the higher the value, the larger the number of clusters produced).

The bibliometric analysis was complemented by a qualitative assessment of the literature that focused on a set of community projects that incorporated social values for sustainable development. In this second phase, from the results of the bibliometric analysis, we presented selected case studies of community-based projects and initiatives. Keywords addressing social values such as: equity, inclusion, justice, human rights, health, values and life quality, were considered to identify the cases, as suggested by Estes [ 17 ]. More constructs were taken into account, such as: strengthening, resilience [ 10 ], and support for change and transformation [ 32 ]. Worldwide initiatives were analysed considering the following questions: what were the project’s goals? To which results has it led, in a sustainable development context? What difference is the project making? The collected case studies were presented in a summary table containing information about the title of the initiative, the goal of the project/programme, the main results, its geographical location and a reference article.

Each reported case study was examined and assessed for its consideration of sustainability topics such as communities’ resilience, social inclusion, gender equality, eco-innovation, and for how those topics intersected with each of the four clusters that emerged from the bibliometric analysis.

For Step 3, the analysis of the results from the previous 2 steps, or phases, served as the foundation for the development of a framework, which associates the case studies (Step 2) with the clusters identified in the bibliometric analysis (Step 1).

Bibliometric analysis

The bibliometric analysis of the 74 selected articles showed that the publication on the topic of social values and sustainable development is still incipient (first publication dated 1992) and with over 60% of the publications occurring in the last 5 years.

Results of the term co-occurrence analysis are presented in Fig.  1

Output of the co-occurrence analysis

and illustrate the main topics associated with social values and sustainable development derived from the literature. Even with a modest set of references resulting from the applied search string, four primary clusters were generated from this initial classification.

The red cluster centres on ecosystem management, such as forest management, incorporating explicitly, social values and sustainable development. Ecosystem management is a concept feature that aims to protect environmental conditions by taking into account the larger ecosystem context, as well as sustainable development and thus, is inclusive of social values and needs [ 35 ]. Similarly, sustainable forest management is a practice in which protecting and maintaining forests’ values is balanced with forests’ sustainable development in a way in which various, sometimes competing, social values come into play [ 6 , 26 ].

The green cluster is focused on rural development, such as privately owned forestry, which suggests that some sustainability development researchers could be interested in the social values of rural development settings. For example, studies from Sweden and China revealed that while rural development efforts can promote sustainable development, there is often an underlying tension between urban and rural social values, suggesting a need to identify more explicitly, the role of and impacts on social value systems in rural areas [ 6 , 27 ].

The blue cluster centres on business sustainability, integrating concepts such as corporate social responsibility, stakeholder engagement (in a corporate setting), and ecosystem services. Businesses have a role to play in achieving sustainable development, and research has explored the ways in which corporate social responsibility is driven by company and stakeholder social values, as well as the challenges of creating an economically viable business while maintaining core values [ 16 , 20 , 60 ]. The small purple cluster is an offshoot of the business-centric blue cluster, with a more specific focus on social responsibility and globalization. For example, a study from Croatia explored the intersection of and tension between the dynamic changes in local economies due to globalization, especially regarding the social values and identity of rural communities that create indigenous products [ 15 ].

Finally, the yellow cluster centres around ethics and moral values. There is much interest in the degree to which ethical and moral values influence environmental attitudes, human capital, adoption of sustainable practices, and transitions to more sustainable futures [ 11 , 12 , 24 , 41 ]. These social values might arise out of religious [ 12 ], educational [ 3 ], or neighbourhood settings [ 41 ].

Case studies

Multiple case studies on social values for sustainable development in community-based projects could be found around the world. Table 1

 shows the case studies in Latin America and the Caribbean, East Africa, North America, Europe, and Asia which were considered in this analysis.

The analysis of the case studies provided in Table 2 demonstrates how any given sustainable development project can address multiple social values while addressing relevant sustainability issues.

Classification of case studies according to the proposed clusters of social values research topics (red: ecosystem management; green: rural development; blue: business sustainability; yellow: ethics and moral values)

further demonstrates the ways in which the community-based sustainable development projects often intersect multiple social value categories. The presented case studies were distributed across the main clusters identified from the bibliometric analysis. The red one represents the ecosystem management, which aims to protect environmental conditions, the green cluster centres on social values in rural development, the blue group gathers social values regarding business sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility along with the offshoot of globalization, and the yellow cluster is focused on ethics and moral values (educational, religious and neighbourhood settings).

Most of the case studies addressed social values related to more than one cluster. For instance, the corporate case called Natura and Co Commitment to Life covers strategies focused on business sustainability, rural development, ecosystem management and ethics and moral values. Withal Natura and Co, cases such as SAKSHAM, Red Rocks Initiative, FAA, INCLUDE, Equator Initiative and What’s for Dinner? point out a strong link between social values across rural development and ecosystem protection. Another meaningful string was found among business sustainability, CSR, and ethical values in view of the case studies Re-Code and the EcoInnovation District in Uptown Pittsburgh.

The implications of the results for the implementation of the SDGs are twofold. Firstly, it illustrates that much can be gained by providing an emphasis on social sustainability when it comes to realizing the SDGs. Secondly, whereas the targets of each SDG are quite specific, social sustainability permeates all of them. This includes not only socially oriented SDGs such as SDG1, SDG2, SDG4, or SDG5 for instance, but also some “technical ones” such as SDG11, SDG12, or SDG13, all of which have strong social roots.

This study has demonstrated that social values are being addressed in community-based sustainable development projects, however the social values considered herein differ depending on the focus of each project. The social values may be related, for example, to rural traditions and cultures, or to business stakeholders. Because sustainable development is locally based and context-specific, such that action and solutions are grounded in local needs [ 58 ], it follows that the social values considered would be tailored to the presenting issue.

However, it also became clear that currently, there is no a common terminology, nor a description of social values in the context of sustainable development. While the number of papers (74) identified in our bibliometric analysis does provide an insight into the broad arenas in which researchers are exploring sustainable development and social values, we are limited in our ability to draw strong conclusions about the realm of social values research in sustainable development. We note, for example, the lack of frequently used terms related to equity and justice, although we are aware that there are researchers that are exploring these topics in a sustainable development framework. This suggests that some scholars who do this type of research are using alternative terms than those we used in our search string (“sustainable development” and “social values”). For example, they might have used the term “sustainability” instead of “sustainable development” or, instead of using “social values” they used a specific social value concept they focused on, such as equity. Thus, we recommend that future research identifies the way in which specific social values are brought into sustainability and sustainable development narratives, such that future analyses can investigate more thoroughly, the ways in which social values are defined and advanced in sustainable development work.

Furthermore, the case studies that included social values in sustainable development were not taken to a broader analysis level to substantiate whether social values are being engendered to promote sustainability. Are the social values considered in rural development, business sustainability, ecosystem management, and morals and ethics likely to promote a societal basis supportive of change and transformation? Are community-based projects assessing the degree to which there is a change in social values that prioritize consumerism, for example, over social well-being? We posit that while it is essential that social values continue to be assessed and incorporated into community-based sustainable development projects as reported, a more comprehensive effort must be started to analyse the ways in which broader social values are impacting our ability to achieve sustainable development in different places around the world.

This paper explores the notions of social values in sustainable development, within the context of community experiences. The literature was reviewed and trends related to social values and sustainable development were investigated, through a bibliometric study and juxtaposed to a set of case studies from a variety of community-based projects, with the goal of illustrating the advantages of a focus on social values can bring about in promoting sustainable development. A framework has been presented that links up the bibliometric clusters and the case studies. The evidence gathered valuable data from these analyses and allow some conclusions to be made.

Firstly, the bibliometric study reveals four clusters where the featured values feature relate to sustainable development. This relationship appears in the contexts of:

Ecosystem management—where social values are evident;

Rural development—where social values in a rural development setting are apparent;

Business sustainability—where values are driven by corporate social responsibility and stakeholder values;

Ethics and moral values about environmental attitudes, human capital, sustainable practices, and a sustainable future.

Secondly, the case studies illustrate that social values are being considered in a variety of projects; the framework deployed to analyse the case studies under the headings identified above, suggests that while community-based sustainable development projects may differ in the values considered, some projects address more than one cluster.

Thirdly, it is apparent that a lack of common terminology in relation to social values in the context of sustainable development is an obstacle to the analysis of the relationship between the two.

Finally, case studies where social values and sustainable development are linked, rarely consider whether social values are being engendered, influenced, or changed as a result of community-based projects. Thus, with less understanding of value change, we may fall short of achieving sustainable development.

The paper has two main implications. The first is that it sheds light on a topic of central relevance, since social components are key elements of sustainability, both as a theme and as an area of knowledge. The second is that the information here compiled and the findings deriving from them provide a timely overview of some of the variables which characterize the extent to which social aspects influence the sustainability debate.

Our research does have some limitations. For instance, it focused on case studies as data collection instruments, and not on other empirical tools such as surveys or interviews. In addition, the range of the case studies is limited to some of the topics identified by the authors, namely rural development, ethics and moral values, business sustainability and ecosystem management. But despite these constraints, the study represents a welcome addition to the literature, in the sense that it has gathered evidence demonstrating how social values under a sustainable development perspective are perceived, and the added value this brings to community experiences.

Moving forward, some measures which may be deployed to better take social values into account, when planning policies or making decisions on spending, which may affect specific groups or communities should be:

A more systematic approach to taking social values into account when undertaking projects on the principles of sustainable development.

A greater use of indicators such as public participation and community acceptance, since some social values are not truly objective and—as such—not easy to quantify.

A more adaptable design and use of a common framework, which may cater for a more accurate measurement of considerations of social values in sustainability projects.

Employment of innovative models to promote social sustainability issues, both in communities, in schools and workplaces, in particular.

A further measure that could implemented is to design tools, which may cater to an assessment of the impacts of a project, as far as influencing social values are concerned. A due emphasis on social values may allow communities and their stakeholders to understand the advantages of pursuing sustainable development, in a way that they can relate to.

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Walter Leal Filho

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Vanessa Levesque

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Subarna Sivapalan

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WLF conceived the study. WLF, VL, SS, ALS, BF, RD, VK, TJL, KEP, UMA, AP, BB, CS wrote the main manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Leal Filho, W., Levesque, V., Sivapalan, S. et al. Social values and sustainable development: community experiences. Environ Sci Eur 34 , 67 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-022-00641-z

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Artificial Intelligence

How we talk about ai is important: a case study, the use of ai in diagnosing dyslexia..

Posted September 13, 2024 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

• The language we use to talk about language-based AI may set expectations beyond current capabilities.
• Conversely, other forms of AI have exceeded expectations by resolving previously intractable problems.
• This discrepancy between expectations and capabilities impacts all our lives through policy and legislation.

How we talk about AI is important—and there has been a lot of such talk lately—due to its potential impact on policy makers and decision-makers. How does one separate hype from reality? Such discourse needs to be grounded in the state of technology—what is unlikely or possible and what has already been realized. We also need to watch our language when discussing AI that has verbal capabilities.

The Person-in-the-Machine Effect With Language-Based AI

AI has been around for over six decades but it only captured the popular imagination lately when it mimicked the faculty that makes us human—language. Humans have a natural ability to produce grammatically acceptable sentences in their native tongues. For decades, linguists struggled with this syntax problem: how to create a model that replicates this ability.

The theoretical models were terribly leaky and created both ungrammatical and grammatical sentences. To skirt around this theoretical problem, large language models, based on the vast data on the internet and elsewhere, produce sentences by predicting the next word.

Why, then, ask whether next-word predictors “lie” or “hallucinate”? We endow machines with human qualities when we use such words. Yet, we cannot help ourselves. When we see or hear language, we instinctively imagine a person behind it. After an early mistake by BMW, car manufacturers became mindful that consumers disfavor certain voices in navigation systems. Consumers react strongly to age, gender , ethnic and other stereotypes—even though there really is no person inside the machine.

We instinctively react to human voice because we need to guess a speaker’s age, gender, height, and size to match the person’s speech signal to the intended word. The physical output is highly variable across speakers, which is why the brain has to make these guesstimates to figure out what was said.

The-Expert-in-the-Machine with Autonomous AI

On the one hand, we may be crediting some forms of AI with more capabilities than they actually possess. On the other, we may not fully recognize the actual capabilities of others.

Consider autonomous AI used in the diagnosis and therapy of neurodevelopmental disorders, functions previously reserved for human experts.

AI is being deployed in this area because it overcomes three major obstacles in traditional practice. The first is the complexity of the problem in the case of a disorder such as dyslexia. A person with dyslexia has difficulty learning to read because of deficits in processing language in the brain.

The linguistic system is immensely complex. It is really a conglomeration of many interlocking systems, each with its components, sub-components and sub-sub-components, all the way down to its atomic elements.

Deficits may occur in any part of this complex system. Given wide individual variation, how can we locate the linguistic deficits of each person with dyslexia? Covering the whole linguistic system to find these deficits would take too long. Even covering just one component fully, such as the phonological (sound) component often implicated in dyslexia research, is not feasible.

Traditional evaluations can only do sample testing. But sampling is just as likely to miss a person’s linguistic deficits as find them.

The AI system for dyslexia neither covers all ground mindlessly nor tests the same sample items. Instead, it proceeds intelligently by using a person’s past and current responses to determine the optimal path forward.

To do so, the AI system cross-references billions of data points in its databases. It synthesizes key information to decide on the next step. AI thus overcomes the second obstacle in traditional practice: capacity to hold a vast volume of information to use in analysis. By comparison, our working memory , the mental space for manipulation of ideas and information, is pitifully limited.

Compare the AI expert system to a human expert. Take a task commonly given to struggling readers: break up a word into its single sounds (word segmentation). This is directly tied to a student’s ability to learn an alphabetic system like English.

Say the student is asked to break up the word “speak” into its sounds (phonetically [spik]). If the student just gives the whole word back as one indivisible unit, the AI system may explore further whether she can operate with smaller units than the word, such as the syllable. If she breaks up the word into two, the AI system can go on to determine whether she can operate with sub-syllabic units such as onset ([sp]) and rime ([ik]), and so forth.

The AI system weighs all these options in real time to decide what to deliver next during its interaction online with this user. Natural language is processed super fast in the brain. Orthographic processing (or spelling) occurs in 100-200 miliseconds; phonological in 200-500 milliseconds. Thus the third obstacle to overcome is speed.

During evaluation and intervention, the AI system can only match and monitor the user’s language processing in real time if it operates autonomously without human input. Thus, such a system has to use autonomous AI.

Real-World Consequences of Ignoring the State of Technology

Autonomous AI was developed to address dyslexia because of the size of the problem. Affecting one in five people, dyslexia costs US taxpayers around $100b a year in special services, and more to support a disproportionate number of prison inmates with this learning disability.

New York, in following the footsteps of other states, is currently considering legislation to mandate dyslexia intervention. But the language of the bill inadvertently limits the provision of intervention services to human specialists.

Whether in legislation or policy, the language used has to be carefully crafted so that it is forward-looking—because the future is already here.

Coral PS Hoh, Ph.D., is a clinical linguist with a PhD in Linguistics and the CEO of EduNational LLC.

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Influence of forest management on the sustainability of community areas in northern inland portugal: a simulated case study assessment.

1. Introduction

2. materials and methods, 2.1. characterization of the area, 2.2. characterization of the forest, 2.3. simulation of forest evolution in modispinaster (dendrometric, carbon, and resin yield), 2.4. cash flow preparation and economic performance indicators, 3.1. dendrometric characteristics of the forest: wood volume and dimensions, 3.2. evolution of carbon stock according to forest management model, 3.3. economic performance of wood and resin production indicators, 4. discussion, 5. conclusions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Share and Cite

Sandim, A.; Araújo, D.; Fonseca, T.; Silva, M.E. Influence of Forest Management on the Sustainability of Community Areas in Northern Inland Portugal: A Simulated Case Study Assessment. Sustainability 2024 , 16 , 8006. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16188006

Sandim A, Araújo D, Fonseca T, Silva ME. Influence of Forest Management on the Sustainability of Community Areas in Northern Inland Portugal: A Simulated Case Study Assessment. Sustainability . 2024; 16(18):8006. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16188006

Sandim, André, Dalila Araújo, Teresa Fonseca, and Maria Emília Silva. 2024. "Influence of Forest Management on the Sustainability of Community Areas in Northern Inland Portugal: A Simulated Case Study Assessment" Sustainability 16, no. 18: 8006. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16188006

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Case Study in Research Integrity: Alcohol and Harassment

There was that bottle of champagne in the breakroom – to be opened when a paper is accepted. Or you heard a colleague’s plan to take a special guest speaker out to dinner at the local watering hole. And, then there were those recruiting events with prospective students that sometimes ended with a happy hour. As many of us have experienced, alcohol may often be part of lab events, conferences, or other related activities. But the presence of alcohol is not an excuse to check professionalism at the door. Here, we are spotlighting this issue to encourage members of the scientific community to consider the potential risks that alcohol can have on the research environment.

Unfortunately, over the past several years we have seen numerous instances where alcohol may have contributed to inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment in the context of scientific research. We are presenting a few case studies below, which are adapted in part from real situations where we worked in tandem with the recipient institutions to address the concerns.

• A postdoctoral fellow sexually assaulted a graduate student after a lab event where alcohol was provided. This fellow was terminated from the institution (who was the recipient of the NIH grant ), and the graduate student was provided with information about how to report to law enforcement. Additionally, the recipient institution directed the principal investigator (PI) to limit alcohol at lab events, as drinking contributed to the abuse.
• A PI at a prestigious scientific conference got severely intoxicated and sexually harassed a postdoctoral fellow. Because the conference organizers made their safety plan widely available and known, the fellow knew who to contact and how to report it. The PI was subsequently removed, an action outline in a safety plan the conference organizers had in place to protect their attendees. And, the PIs institution decided to remove the person from NIH grants, an action that NIH thought appropriate.
• A lab head repeatedly encouraged and pressured their junior staff to drink alcohol and made inappropriate sexual comments while on travel. The institution removed the lab head from serving as PI on NIH awards, prohibited them from applying for new funding, and placed restrictions on travel and the use of alcohol at lab-related events. The institution also identified a new co-mentor for the junior scientists, engaged an external coach to work with the lab head on professional behavior, and began conducting quarterly climate assessments of the lab. NIH also requested regular updates from the recipient institution on their progress.
• A lab head sent abusive emails to colleagues and staff. The institution also determined that the lab head was keeping alcohol in the office and working while under the influence, which may have contributed to the inappropriate communications. The recipient institution subsequently put their employee on administrative leave for several months. Upon their return to the lab, the institution also appointed a co-Director to provide additional oversight and mentoring.  

The National Academies reiterated in their 2019 report that organizational tolerance of alcohol use increases the chance of sexual or gender harassment (see also these articles from 2007 , 2005 , and 2002 ). Their report adds that such permissiveness leads some people to avoid lab related social events that involve alcohol. Furthermore, a 2019 report from an Advisory Committee to the NIH Director working group retold a story from a graduate student who was a target of sexual harassment where alcohol was involved.

This type of behavior in a professional setting violates grant policies and can even rise to a criminal offense. We are disheartened to receive reports about such unacceptable behavior, and we note that in the majority of these cases the recipient institution has taken serious actions in consultation with NIH. Based on the severity of the non-compliance, such actions included suspending personnel, removing principal investigators from NIH awards, placing restrictions around alcohol use at lab-related events, and imposing restrictions on travel and conference attendance.

While responsible inclusion of alcohol in celebrations or social outings may not pose a problem, researchers and their institutions should be mindful of how alcohol can contribute to unprofessional behaviors and sexual harassment. Also, keep in mind that purchasing alcoholic beverages is not an allowable grant-associated expense .

Relatedly, NIH-sponsored conferences must have approved safety plans . The strategies discussed in those plans aim to promote safe environments through communicating with attendees, documenting allegations and resulting actions, and other relevant steps to ensure a safe and respectful environment (see also this All About Grants podcast ). If someone at the conference is harassed, and whether or not alcohol was involved, they should feel empowered and protected to report the incident.

In our continued effort to make research environments safe , collectively we must be cognizant of situations that precipitate inappropriate behavior. Nobody should be bullied or pressured if they do not want to have a drink. All social events that include alcohol should also offer non-alcohol containing beverages for those choosing not to drink alcohol. Staff should feel comfortable attending social activities. There should not be an undercurrent or expectation to engage in activities counter to the individual’s personal choices or beliefs. For resources about what constitutes alcohol misuse and how to seek help, please see Rethinking Drinking and the Treatment Navigator  from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Please also visit our website to inform us if you have any concerns that harassment, discrimination, or other inappropriate conduct may be affecting NIH supported research. You can remain anonymous. More on how to ensure safe and respectful workplaces is available on this podcast .

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I would urge the author to consider reframing contents of this article to reflect decades of research indicating that sexual assault, while often involving alcohol, is a an issue of power. Blaming alcohol, as the article suggests, for sexual assaults without recognizing the role power plays in the assault risks abuses continuing, if not exacerbating, since alcohol quashes the personal and social responsibilities of consent. Frankly, this is an embarrassing article to have on the NIH website, and I’d recommend the scholar learn from women in the fields of domestic violence and sexual assault research before publishing future research on the subject.

We appreciate your point about considering how power imbalances may contribute to harassment. Appropriately recognizing and addressing that issue is something we take seriously to ensure that NIH-supported research is conducted in safe and respectful workplaces. The following post may also be of interest: https://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/2023/07/17/case-study-in-research-integrity-banned-from-supervising-cant-go-in-lab-but-no-impact-on-nih-funded-research/

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Eight years on and not forgotten: Local Dad shares wife’s blood cancer story to highlight importance of medical research in Northern Ireland

September is Blood Cancer Awareness Month and Today is Legacy Giving Day. Giving hope for 60 years: Leukaemia & Lymphoma NI's legacy in the fight against blood cancer - As we celebrate 60 years of Leukaemia & Lymphoma NI's tireless work in the fight against blood cancer, we are honoured to share the powerful stories of those who have been directly touched by this disease. Through a series of compelling case studies, patients, family members and researchers open up about their personal journeys, offering a poignant look at the challenges they’ve faced, the resilience they’ve shown and the hope that continues to drive them forward.

• 09:34, 13 SEP 2024
• Updated 12:21, 14 SEP 2024

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A local father of two has been sharing the story of his wife’s fight against blood cancer to help highlight the importance of supporting local medical research funded by Leukaemia and Lymphoma NI.

Alison and Barry Williamson and their two young children Rhys and Mya lived in Tandragee, Co Armagh . Alison was a much-loved member of her community. She worked as a classroom assistant at Tandragee Primary School and was well-known for her enthusiasm, energy and mischievous sense of humour. She had a zest for life and was fiercely positive, no matter what challenges life threw at her.

“Alison was pretty much just the perfect person,” explained Barry. “She was truly an inspiration to everyone that knew her. Her family was her life but she was always helping others.”

Towards the end of 2014, Alison began to feel unwell. She saw her weight drop rapidly.

“Alison really started behaving out of character. Often she would come home from school and need to lie down. She was constantly feeling drained and was sleeping more and more. That’s when we went to the doctor.”

Alongside the fatigue, Alison started experiencing pain in her abdomen. Eventually she underwent an operation to remove her spleen. “At that point, we thought she had started to turn a corner” said Barry, “we were hopeful that might be it and we had found the root of the problem.”

Unfortunately, in August 2015 after several more tests, the family received news of Alison’s diagnosis of Hepatosplenic T-cell Lymphoma, a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer.

“When we received the news, Alison was steadfast and determined. Whilst I sat in the corner of the room distraught, she simply said ‘Ok, I’m going to fight this.’ That’s what kind of person she was. Sharing the news with our two children was obviously a very difficult thing to have to do. But Alison was unwaveringly positive.”

After her diagnosis, Alison endured 50 days of chemotherapy and eventually was earmarked for a stem cell transplant.

“It became a race against time to find a matching donor. Everyone in our family got tested. Both Alison and I were very lucky to have such close supportive families and friends and everyone rallied round us. As always, Alison took on the news of the transplant head on.”

Alison was treated at Craigavon Hospital, was then moved to Dublin and then finally brought to Belfast City Hospital. At one stage she was taking 53 tablets a day.

“She never complained” said Barry, “it wasn’t in her nature. She was prepared to do whatever it took – undergo any treatments available – to give her the chance to spend more time with her family.”

However, on 14 May 2016, in the Intensive Care Unit of Belfast City Hospital and nine months after her initial diagnosis, Alison died. “She never gave up the fight and up until her last day I was still holding hope that she would pull through, but her body just simply couldn’t take any more.

"Alison is, without doubt, sorely missed by us and those close to her. When grief comes into your life it stays day and night. I found strength from my two children. They didn’t want to see me so sad all the time. They were grieving too and I had to make life good for them and teach them, as best I could, how to live life and find joy in things. That is why the charity and the work I try to do will make a difference to others. I take inspiration from my late wife and the fight she put up to live, and I hope she is proud of me for that.”

Since her passing, Barry, his friends and his family decided that raising money for Leukaemia & Lymphoma NI was the best way to honour her memory.

“It was Alison who started the charity work before she died, so it seemed only right to continue with it after she passed.

“Since then we’ve climbed the four highest peaks in the UK in the space of 48 hours and scaled part of the Alps, moving through three countries across three consecutive days. We’ve done glass walks, fire walks, held gala charity balls and staged mega balloon releases.

“Friends held coffee mornings and my then Rector Dean Forster and Ballymore Church allsupported me, the children and the charity in so many ways. Alison’s Mum and friend did a sky dive, the school where Alison worked staged various fundraising events and we have done so many other things with the help of family and friends, too many to mention.

“Throughout it all, we’ve felt closer to Alison – it’s kept her with us. The fundraising is something we plan to continue and we hope others will consider donating or running their own fundraising activities. It’s such a worthy cause and the charity is funding crucial research.”

The money raised by Barry and his friends and family funded the Alison Williamson PhD Studentship in 2017, leaving a lasting legacy in blood cancer research. Dr Harmony Black completed her PhD in Repair Mechanisms in 2020 and is now working as a clinical scientist in the haematology department at Belfast City Hospital where she plays a vital role in screening and analysing patient samples.

Leukaemia and Lymphoma NI recently announced a special programme of activities to mark the 60th year of the charity and to raise funds for the fight against blood cancer.

Alongside this, the charity is calling for those who have experienced Leukaemia, Lymphoma, Myeloma, or other blood cancer, and their loved ones, to share their experiences online via the LLNI website – Share your story - LLNI

The photos and extended captions gathered will form part of a special canvas presented online where members of the public can read the stories of people affected by blood cancer across the region.

Throughout September LLNI is holding a series of fundraising activities, culminating in the charity hosting a Black Tie & Diamonds Gala Ball at Titanic Belfast, where the winner of an ongoing raffle for a diamond pendant necklace will be selected at random.

Members of the public can share their story, make a donation or buy tickets for the diamond necklace raffle on the Leukaemia & Lymphoma NI website – www.llni.co.uk

Choosing to leave a gift to LLNI is a wonderful gesture to ensure that your legacy lives on through research long after you are gone. Visit www.lni.co.uk.

• Titanic Belfast
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Sustainable e-waste management in higher education institutions: case study of Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology

• Original Paper
• Published: 14 September 2024

Cite this article

• T. Q. Thao 1 , 2 ,
• T. H. Hanh 1 , 2 &
• N. N. Huy   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2918-7935 1 , 2  

The global concern for e-waste necessitates comprehensive research, especially in educational institutions. This paper examines the case study of Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), examining the generation, flow, and potential environmental impact of e-waste from 2024 to 2034. The research incorporates life cycle inventory (LCI) and material flow analysis (MFA) to estimate the volume and composition of obsolete electronic and electrical equipment (EEE). The study reveals a substantial increase in discarded devices at HCMUT, aligning with campus expansions. E-waste is estimated to generated 1.5 times from 16,792 kg in 2024 to 25,230 kg in 2034, emphasizing the urgency for effective waste management. MFA models delineate the flow of e-waste materials, emphasizing the need for targeted recycling measures. The examination of specific EEE types (projectors, computers, air conditioners, and lamps) reveals varying recyclability proportions, necessitating tailored management strategies. The absence of a specific e-waste management law in Vietnam, coupled with manual and unsafe processing practices, contributes to environmental and health hazards. The paper emphasizes the imperative for sustainable practices in higher education institutions (HEIs) and presents HCMUT's case as pivotal. The university's commitment to sustainable development is highlighted, underscoring the importance of integrating e-waste management into broader environmental strategies. As HEIs globally struggle with e-waste challenges, the study proposes a framework for effective management, incorporating LCI and MFA for informed decision-making. The results provide valuable insights for developing practical and sustainable e-waste management measures, guiding HEIs toward minimizing environmental impact while fostering a culture of responsible e-waste practices.

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Source: compiled from Huisman ( 2008 ); Cheung et al. ( 2017 ); (Nguyen 2018 )

Source: HCMUT Department of Equipment Management

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All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article. The other datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), VNU-HCM for this study.

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T. Q. Thao, T. H. Hanh & N. N. Huy

Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, Linh Trung Ward, Thu Duc District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

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TQT conceived, designed, and supervised the study and prepared the first draft manuscript. THH collected and processed data. NNH prepared and revised the whole manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Thao, T.Q., Hanh, T.H. & Huy, N.N. Sustainable e-waste management in higher education institutions: case study of Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-024-06012-w

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Received : 02 April 2024

Revised : 09 August 2024

Accepted : 19 August 2024

Published : 14 September 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-024-06012-w

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