Case Studies

3.27. Analysis Phase

The analysis phase:

1. Put all the information in one place.

Now you have collected a lot of information from people, from articles and books. You can’t include it all. So, you need to think about how to sort through it, take out the excess, and arrange it so that the situation at the case site will be understandable to your readers. Before you can do this, you have to put all the information together where you can see it and analyse what is going on.

1. Assign sections of material to different people.

Each person or group should try to figure out what is really important, what is happening, and what a case reader would need to know in order to understand the situation. It may be useful, for example, to put all the information about visitors on one chart, or on a chart that shows visitors to two different sites throughout a year.

1. Try to formulate the case problem in a few sentences.

When you do this, you may find that you need more information. Once you are satisfied with the way you have defined the problem you want your readers to think about and break the problem down into all its parts. Each one represents a piece of the puzzle that needs to be understood before the problem can be solved. Then spend some time discussing these with the others in your group.

For example suppose:

1. Your heritage site doesn’t have many visitors, but many people say they would like to visit if it had services.
2. There is unemployment in the village around the site.
3. The town is big enough to be able to accommodate many more visitors.
4. The surrounding environment (animals, trees and plants) need to be protected from too many visitors.
5. The town is far away, but there are no places to eat or sleep around there.
6. The government owns the location, but the government does not want to own and operate either a restaurant or a hotel.

Ask yourselves: “How much information do people who will read your case study need to have in order to be able to discuss items a through f?”

One answer to ‘a’ is that they need to know data about past numbers of visitors, and they need to know what evidence exists that more people want to visit but are discouraged from going there. Your evidence will come from the articles and statistics you have gathered, and from the interviews you have completed.

Once you have broken down the problem into pieces, you can analyse the information you now have and see if you can think about possible answers to each of the pieces. If you have enough information, then you can think about how to write the case study itself.