Participatory Single Case Study — Collaborative In-Depth Case Inquiry

In a standard case study the researcher designs the study, collects and analyzes data, and reports findings. In a participatory single case study, community members or practitioners are actively involved as co-researchers in some or all of those stages. This changes the epistemological basis of the work — insider knowledge and priorities co-shape the inquiry — and adds explicit action or empowerment goals alongside knowledge generation.

Both involve community co-researchers and action goals, but PAR is a broad methodology that can span many sites or cycles over years. A participatory single case study is bounded by a specific case — one organization, event, or community at a defined time — and inherits Yin's analytic framework for case study rigor (triangulation, case description, theoretical generalization). PAR emphasizes iterative action-reflection cycles; the participatory case study emphasizes deep, bounded case description with collaborative validity.

Yes. Participatory case studies appear in journals across education, public health, social work, and disability studies. Reviewers will expect you to articulate the case boundaries clearly, describe the participatory structure and how power was shared, demonstrate methodological rigor through triangulation and member checking, and address transferability through thick contextual description rather than statistical sampling logic.

Because there is only one case, the participant count depends on the nature of that case. A study of a single classroom might involve 25–30 participants; a study of a community organization's leadership might involve 5–10. What matters is that the data are sufficient to describe the case with depth and that the participatory structure includes meaningful community involvement in the research process, not a specific headcount.

Following Yin, a case is a bounded, real-world phenomenon — an individual, group, organization, program, event, or community — studied in its natural context. The boundaries must be defined in advance: which entity, during what period, examined through which conceptual lens. A poorly defined case leads to diffuse data collection and analytic confusion; this definitional work is the most important early step in the design.