Know which method fits
before you design the study.

A different approach to case study vs. narrative research.

La recherche d'étude de cas et la recherche narrative sont deux approches qualitatives construites sur la même matière première : les entrevues, les observations et les documents. La différence réside dans ce que vous en faites. Une étude de cas se limite à un contexte, un programme, une organisation, un seul site, et étudie ce contexte en profondeur, en tirant souvent plusieurs sources de preuves pour trianguler une découverte. La recherche narrative suit la façon dont une personne donne un sens à sa propre expérience, structurée comme une histoire avec un début, des tournants et une fin, et analysée pour cette structure autant que pour son contenu.

Why the line gets blurry

The confusion is not really about definitions. It is about what happens once the interviews are done. A researcher sits down with twelve transcripts from the same nonprofit and has to decide, by hand, whether this is one case with twelve data sources or twelve separate stories. Get the boundary wrong and the analysis wobbles: cross-participant themes get treated as personal narrative arcs, or a genuinely individual story gets flattened into a generic organizational finding. Most methods texts group case studies into four broad types: descriptive, exploratory, explanatory, and intrinsic, a single case studied for its own sake rather than to build theory. Narrative inquiry does not sort as neatly. A typical example follows one person, a teacher moving into a new role, a patient managing a diagnosis, through in-depth interviews, then analyzes how they structure that transition as a story: what changed, when, and what it meant to them.

Reading the transcript for method, not just words

Speak AI transcrit chaque entrevue dans votre langue, avec 100+ langues prises en charge, puis lit l'enregistrement lui-même : le ton et le rythme du récit, le moment où l'énergie d'un participant change, les moments qui ressemblent à un tournant par rapport à un détail de routine. Cette distinction est importante pour le codage narratif en particulier, car le sens d'une histoire réside souvent dans la façon dont elle a été racontée, pas seulement dans ce qui a été dit. Pour le travail d'étude de cas, les mêmes transcriptions sont marquées par site, rôle du participant et source de données, de sorte que la comparaison entre cas reste organisée au lieu d'être dispersée dans des dossiers et des noms de fichiers.

Then you can ask questions across the whole project with AI chat, using the same coding logic a research team would apply by hand, now running natively over every transcript with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini built in.

Case study or narrative inquiry: the actual differences

• Focus: a case study bounds itself to a context, a program, an organization, a site. Narrative research bounds itself to a person's account of their experience.
• Data: case studies typically triangulate interviews, documents, and observation across a bounded case. Narrative research relies mainly on first-person interviews and the stories people tell.
• Analysis: case studies compare within and across cases for patterns. Narrative research analyzes plot, sequence, and turning points to find how meaning gets constructed.
• Output: a case study produces a context-rich account of one bounded situation. Narrative research produces an account of how someone experienced and now tells that situation.

From twelve transcripts to a defensible method

The result is a coding pass you can actually defend in a methods chapter or a client deliverable: every code traceable to a quote, every case boundary or narrative arc documented instead of remembered. Trends across a full project become a report instead of a hunch, and des tableaux de bord que vous pouvez personnaliser et mettre en marque blanche track theme frequency and case comparisons over time, so this round of interviews is measured against the last one. A global market research firm put its multi-country qualitative interviews through this workflow and saved $60K+ and 950+ hours, shifting analyst time back to interpretation instead of administrative coding.

And because the same engine reads case documents, narrative interviews, and everyday conversations on the same platform, you can query all of it, or hand it to an AI assistant through the Serveur MCP, without switching tools between methods.