Jamie is conducting a study of hyperactive children. he recruits two children identified by teachers as hyperactive and takes a
detailed history by interviewing the child and the child's parents over a period of several days, looking for patterns in the child's early experiences that may have contributed to the child's hyperactivity. jamie's research plan is referred to as the
The research methodology that Jamie is using to study hyperactive children is called a case study.
A case study refers to <em>a study of individual (s), especially for establishing a new phenomenon that does not occur often in the general population. </em>It usually requires an up-close and in-depth look of a subject and it generally requires the use of observation and interviews. The results of the study tend to be more qualitative in nature, though they can also be a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative.
The research plan Jamie chooses to identify what experiences may contribute to children's hyperactivity is referred to as the case study method. A case study method is a deeper analysis of one person's behavior (or a small number of people's) that allows the researcher to obtain more details and also to reconstruct the 'case history' of a participant.
