What is a Case Study?

- An in-depth exploration of one particular case (situation or subject) for the purpose of gaining depth of understanding into the issues being investigated. For example, out of 30 in-depth interviews, one may be singled out for a case study.

- an in-depth study of one individual or situation. The data in such a study may be recorded in field notes, typically a chronological account of both formal and informal observations. These notes are summarized and usually analyzed using some form of coding that identifies important trends and relationships in the data.

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You want to find out if the average user can be comfortable with your new products/services you are about to release to the public. The best places to acquire such traffic of mixed thoughts are forums. Forums are the best place for argumentative and communication on specified topics. Forums are dedicated sites that are specifically dedicated to a topic or niche. Examples can be Making Money Online, Creating Web Designs, Gardening Tips, etc. By joining one forum is a good start to post your arguments or ideas to the public. Remember forums are a community of users that interact by ideas and will help you if needed. Contributing to a forum community is helpful as well, as it provides recognition. If you post more you are likely to be trusted with ideas rather than someone that just joins to spam a forum.

If you join multiple forums with good quality traffic your chance of getting your question or ideas responded too will be less than 24 hours. Also, by joining more than one can help contribute to your case study. With that said lets move on.

Most forums these days have a built in poll, this is very helpful when doing your case study the users do not have to leave the forum to take a poll. Sometimes leaving a website can throw a user from participating with your case study. The only drawback is it limits 1 question and several or a max of 5 answers; which in essence why joining several forums can help the contribution to your survey or polls. You can create 1 question for each forum or create an offline survey with 1 link. I personally use a offline survey for my case studies but propose the topic to several forums. This gives me my targeted traffic and a mix of answers from experts and beginners, giving me an equal balance of professional answers and redundant answers.

Another way is to create an argumentative topic or a updating controversy, where you would participate, either arguing with another or updating the forum on your new site or topic created. This is very good, because it gathers a vast majority of information, one contradicting another and others backing up another. Why this is better than this or why its not. Creating a post that is argumentative which then creates several pages on this topic is a great case study, since you have multiple answer form different directions. One user can back another user saying his strategy worked while others can argue it will not. A so called "war" creates tense in the forum and others will view and add their own comments quoting others and arguing their idea.

Once you have determined you have gather most of your data and enough ideas were thrown you can use this towards a case study, seeing how other react to a question, liking or disliking your idea/proposal.

A community forum is very popular when it comes to information, users will share information with you because they want to help you and see you succeed with your project asked. Keeping in contact with these forums can help grow your knowledge and you can receive so much feedback from so much mixed minds.

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