Case study dissertations are an increasingly popular mode of discourse. If you've already decided upon the nature and build of your thesis, there's a good chance one of the first ideas you had was to formalize a case study – they're handy, and a higher volume of professors are mentioning them to would-be graduates year over year. With that in mind, it's important that you understand the basis, so we're going to take a cursory examination of this style. It's just a brief foundational article, but if you're lost for ideas, it ought to point you in the right direction.

You aren't taking a broad view.

Unlike the holistic approach found in other dissertation styles, case study tends toward a very particular – and often considerably slimmer – set of instances. You're documenting a small margin of items in your chosen field and scrutinizing them as thoroughly as can be in search of a new development for that hyper-focused margin. For example, if you're in the field of law and your objective is to analyze trends in armed robbery in a given city, you might do so between the years of 2014 and 2016, and you'll probably just select four or five individual cases. You'll study them (see where the term "case study" stems from?) in painstaking detail, after having concocted a thesis. Prove or disprove that thesis in the following ways, but bear in mind the difference here is that in more all-encompassing papers you might have instead studied that city's armed robberies in an entire decade and not spent as much time and effort on just a few instances.

You're allowed to get "bogged down" in the little things.

When we talk to students about most dissertation formats, we're usually careful to advise them not to get too wrapped-up in minute details during the research phase. That doesn't apply here. You want to get wrapped-up, because you want to take finite elements and research the heck out of them. Be extremely choosy about the information you wish to learn about and then expand upon. Be selective. Narrow down your scope considerably relative to some of the things you might find your fellow students doing.

Field study must follow suit.

What we mean is that once you're out in the field you need to approach your cases comprehensively and systematically. Although "holistic" is a word we've noted you don't want to use for your overall project, it does apply to your field work. You want to examine every angle, every possible discrepancy, of the limited number of instances you're investigating. If you need help developing great techniques for this task, get assistance on the web here.

Write your data out in a reasonably simplistic manner.

This is where those long grueling years of English composition class begin to pay off in spades. Although your investigation will be meticulous, your report needs to be fairly straightforward. You don't want to hurt the "readability" of your paper by becoming overly technical to the point of confusion. Your reader should be able to question your study and then examine it for every answer to that question. Your goal here is to present an exceptionally complicated problem but to do so in such a way that your audience has no major challenges in understanding your findings. This can be tricky, and there are all sorts of articles elsewhere that will aid you in the endeavor, but by following along with what we've provided here we believe you can begin in earnest!