| Write-up
With regard to the write-up, few researchers use case studies as an illustration. Two notable exception are case studies that serve as an illustration that supports or rejects previously developed propositions or hypotheses (Beltagui, 2018; Cheung et al., 2017). In another study, researchers introduce the case in the introduction and report: “As we tried to make sense of these surprising developments, we were confronted with an unexpected finding” (Wiedner et al., 2017). Here, the case is used as motivation. The large majority of the researchers, however, use cases as inspiration in response to a lack of theoretical frameworks or empirical evidence and/or the need for in-depth and richer descriptions of the phenomena. Figure 6 summarizes these findings along with the way in which researchers structure the findings, thereby showing that thematic structuring is most popular.
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In each of these write-up styles, researchers can integrate case evidence in multiple ways to establish a chain of evidence. The most popular way of integrating case evidence is by including quotes in the text (45 studies). Next, several researchers propose a figure or table in which the data structure along with case evidence is presented (27 studies). Additionally, researchers also add figures or tables to compare different cases with one another in terms of the different categories or themes, by which some researcher also refer to the extent to which a category or theme is present in a case (21 studies). To convey the key findings, researchers often propose a visual summary of the results and/or a conceptual model (38 studies). In all aforementioned situations, researchers can or cannot integrate propositions in the results or the discussion section (see Figure 6).
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