Abstract:
Case study research is among the most used research methods in the Information Systems discipline. Over the last years, an increasing number of publications use case studies with only few sources of evidence, such as single interviews per case. While there is a lot of methodological guidance on how to rigorously conduct multiple case studies, it remains unclear how researchers may achieve an acceptable level of rigor for this emerging type of multiple case studies with few sources of evidence, i.e., multiple mini case studies. In this context, we aggregate the methodological guidance for multiple case study research from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Further, we calibrate this guidance to multiple mini case studies by reviewing previous IS publications using multiple mini case studies to offer a step-by-step guide. Finally, we identify two advantageous scenarios to use multiple mini case studies as a pragmatic and rigorous approach. While multiple mini case studies have been widely spread among conference papers, there is potential to use this type of multiple case study research in the wider IS discipline.
Short Bio:
Susanne is a professor for Business Information Systems, esp. IS in Trade and Industry at TU Dresden, Germany. Before joining TU Dresden, she held positions at the University of Augsburg and the European Business School. She graduated from the Darmstadt University of Technology where she also obtained her Ph.D. and completed her habilitation thesis. Her research interests focus on IS management & sourcing, ERP systems, and enterprise modeling. Currently, Susanne is the spokesperson of the Scientific Commission for Business & Information Systems Engineering (WKWI) within the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB e.V.).