The Use of Qualitative Case Study in Nursing

Case study as a qualitative research has been used in many disciplines including sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, medicine, education, political science, and economics. Now, case study is used by nursing researchers for exploring phenomena in health care practice. The article aimed to assess the principles of the case study and its’ using in nursing.
Computerized search was done in Medline and Elsevier databases with case study, qualitative research, and nursing keywords among the articles in English language between 2000 and 2015. The main themes, agreement, and disagreement were assessed among the articles.
Case study is a research approach for providing deeper understanding of the complex and multifaceted phenomenon in real life context and checks general and significant characteristics of events. So, using this method is useful to evaluate the performance of nursing practice. This method was used in some of nursing researches.
Qualitative case study is a method that can play an important role in the production new knowledge in nursing and health system research by providing a holistic view about a phenomenon.