This chapter describes the adaptation of the case study method to assessing increasingly complex, comprehensive reform initiatives that highlight the blurring of the boundaries between phenomenon and context and the concurrence of multiple interventions. Completed studies of two education reform programs illustrate the ongoing challenges of…

Describes a case study survey method that allows an analyst to aggregate (by means of a closed-ended questionnaire) the case study experiences and to assess the quality of each case study in a reliable and replicable manner. (Author/IRT)

In the last 10 years, there has been increased use of case study methodology, with accompanying refinement and improvement of the methods. Case studies have become legitimate research methods in evaluation, but it is too soon to say whether improvements in methodology are really resulting in improvements in the case studies conducted. (SLD)

The Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) Program was established as a demonstration program in 1998 and authorized as a full program in 2002 as part of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). It is one approach to help low-performing K-12 public schools meet state performance standards. CSR emphasizes two major concepts: mandating that school reform…

R. T. Ogawa and B. Malen's article does not meet its own recommended standards for rigorous testing and presentation of its own conclusions. Use of the exploratory case study to analyze multivocal literatures is not supported, and the claim of grounded theory to analyze multivocal literatures may be stronger. (SLD)

The purpose of this review was to examine research designs in studying knowledge utilization. The results are based on 32 studies of knowledge utilization, and the report describes the various types of research designs and their strengths and weaknesses. Survey research methods are appropriate for dealing with either of two aspects of a…

The goal of this report is to describe the process by which new service practices in urban bureaucracies become routinized. The routinization process is studied by examining the life histories of six types of innovations: computer-assisted instruction; police computer systems; mobile intensive care units; closed circuit television systems; breath…

In these appendices different aspects of the case study approach to organizational change are covered. A comparison is made between on-site interviews and telephone interviews as methods of data collection. It is concluded that in spite of the great disparity in costs, the use of personal interviews is a necessary method for data collection.…

It is assumed that evaluators of the future will still be interested in case study methodology. Scenarios that ignore a case study method, that look back to a distinctive case study method, and that see the case study method as an integrating force in the qualitative-quantitative debate are explored. (SLD)

As part of their study of interorganizational collaboration, researchers present three detailed case studies of how regional education agencies (REAs) supply knowledge utilization services to the school districts they serve. The three REAs are the Wayne County (Michigan) Intermediate School District (with 36 districts), the Educational Improvement…

A study examined six cases where job training and economic development had been successfully linked through an interorganizational arrangement. Cases were nominated by U.S. Employment and Training Administration officials, job training and economic development experts, and published reports. The six organizations of primary focus were Pima County…

Three case studies of interorganizational collaboration between regional education agencies (REAs) and school districts illustrate how successful knowledge utilization occurs. Researchers studied how knowledge utilization services in four areas--staff development, linking agent assistance, information retrieval, and broad organizational…

Urban decentralization is an attempt to reorganize local services through some combination of: (1) giving service recipients or clients greater responsibility over service policies (the client dimension) and (2) increasing service resources at the level of specific, geographically defined neighborhoods (the territorial dimension). The…

This case study, one in a series of research efforts designed to examine the utilization of the Administration on Aging's research, describes the different types of uses of materials produced by a research project on improvement of transportation services for the elderly. (The materials are a state-of-the-art report, planning handbook, and…

The purpose of the study reported here was to assess the various decentralization efforts as they occurred in different services and in different cities. The study reviewed decentralization's record in terms of five outcomes: (1) Increases in the flow of information between servers and served; (2) Improvements in service officials attitudes; (3)…