Comparer des méthodes

	Recherche biographique	Case Study	Ethnographie
Domaine	Qualitatif	Qualitatif	Qualitatif
Famille	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Année d'origine	Late 19th–early 20th century (Dilthey ~1883; Thomas & Znaniecki 1918–1920)	1984 (seminal codification)	c. 1922 (Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific)
Auteur d'origine	Wilhelm Dilthey (hermeneutic foundations); Thomas & Znaniecki (sociological application); Norman Denzin (interpretive biography)	Robert K. Yin (systematised in Case Study Research, 1984)	Bronisław Malinowski (modern ethnography); rooted in 19th-century anthropology
Type	Qualitative research method	Qualitative research design	Qualitative fieldwork tradition
Source fondatrice	Denzin, N. K. (1989). Interpretive Biography. Sage Publications.	Yin, R.K. (2018). Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods (6th ed.). Sage. ISBN: 978-1506336169	Hammersley, M. & Atkinson, P. (2019). Ethnography: Principles in Practice (4th ed.). Routledge. ISBN: 978-1138504462
Alias	life history research, biographical method, life story research, biographical narrative inquiry	Vaka Çalışması (Case Study), case study design, case study methodology	Etnografi, participant observation, fieldwork, ethnographic research
Apparentées	6	5	5
Résumé	Biographical research is a qualitative method that examines individual lives in depth — through life-history interviews, personal documents, letters, and autobiographical narratives — to understand how personal experience intersects with social, historical, and cultural forces. Rooted in Wilhelm Dilthey's hermeneutics and made prominent in sociology by Thomas and Znaniecki's study of Polish immigrants, it treats the individual life story as a window onto broader social structures and processes. It belongs to the narrative inquiry subfamily alongside oral history and life-story research.	Case study research is a qualitative research design that investigates a specific phenomenon, individual, group, organisation, or event in depth within its real-world context. Systematised by Robert K. Yin in 1984, it supports single-case and multiple-case designs and draws on multiple data sources — interviews, observation, documents, and artefacts — to build a rich, contextualised account of a bounded unit.	Ethnography is a qualitative research tradition in which a researcher immerses themselves in a social group or community over an extended period — typically three to six months or longer — to study its culture, values, and behaviours in their natural setting. Originating in social and cultural anthropology, and consolidated as a rigorous method by Bronisław Malinowski in the early twentieth century, ethnography produces rich, contextualised accounts of how people live, work, and make meaning together.