Developing a rigorous case study in research of primary healthcare service management

Abstract

The aim of the article is to help general practitioners and primary care researchers understand the fundamentals of designing case studies by explaining and analysing the standard developing procedures. The analysis of the rigorous designing and implementing steps will help academic general practitioners having comprehension of the specific research design process, which is to ensuring the quality of case studies. In the first part of the article, findings of literature review were described for exploring evolution of case studies, the concept and contexts of the study, as well research questions that suitable be answered by the study. In the next part of the article, the standard operational procedures for conducting a case study were introduced, with examples from general practice and primary healthcare. These procedures include: (1)initiating the planning phase to determine the appropriateness of a case study; (2)designing the study, including case selection and identifying the type of case study; (3)preparing for fieldwork through researcher training and pilot testing; (4)collecting data from multiple sources; (5)analyzing the data to generate evidence-based conclusions; (6)reporting results and communicating with readers. Case study is suitable for addressing the "what" "how" and "why" questions in general practice and primary healthcare, with a broad application prospect.

Keywords

General practice / Primary healthcare / Case study / Research methods / Standard operating procedures

Authors' contributions

Conceptualization, Z.S.; Methodology, not applicable; Data curation, not applicable; Formal analysis, not applicable; Funding acquisition, D.Q.; Project administration, not applicable; Resources, not applicable; Supervision, D.Q. and Q.L.; Validation, D.Q. and Q.L.; Writing—original draft, Z.S., J.C. and W.S.; Writing—review and editing, D.Q. and Q.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Ethical approval and consent to participate

Not applicable.

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable.

Funding

This work was supported by the Key Project of the National Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of China (Grant number: 20AZD081).

Declaration of competing interest

Z.S. is the editorial member of Chinese General Practice Journal, he is not envolved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article. All authors declare that there are no competing interests.

Acknowledgements

Not applicable.

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