Jämför metoder

	Kritiskt fallstudie	Tolkande fallstudie
Ämnesområde	Kvalitativa metoder	Kvalitativa metoder
Familj	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Ursprungsår	1980s–2006 (formalized)	1978–1995 (Stake's foundational works)
Upphovsperson	Bent Flyvbjerg (formalized); Robert K. Yin (case study typology)	Robert E. Stake; extended by Bent Flyvbjerg
Typ	Qualitative research design	Qualitative research design
Ursprungskälla	Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245.	Stake, R. E. (1995). The Art of Case Study Research. Sage. ISBN: 978-0803957671
Alias	critical case, strategic case study, critical-instance case study, paradigmatic case study	intrinsic case study, constructivist case study, qualitative case study, naturalistic case study
Närliggande	6	6
Sammanfattning	A critical case study is a case study design in which the researcher deliberately selects a case that is strategically important for testing, confirming, challenging, or extending an existing proposition, theory, or policy claim. Rather than choosing a typical or representative case, the researcher argues that if the finding holds here — in this most-likely, least-likely, or paradigmatic instance — it can reasonably be expected to hold more broadly. This purposive logic transforms a single case into a powerful analytical tool.	Interpretive case study is a qualitative research design in which the researcher selects a bounded real-world case — a person, program, event, organization, or community — and seeks to understand it from the inside, through the meanings participants themselves construct. Unlike explanatory or descriptive case study, the interpretive variant foregrounds the researcher's active role in making sense of complex, context-laden data rather than testing hypotheses or cataloguing facts.