The phenomenological case study design was preferred for this study due to
its emphasis on subjects’ perspectives and the meanings they construct of the
phenomena under study (Merriam, 1998; Patton, 2002). Merriam (1998) sees a case as “a
phenomenon that is inherently bounded, with a finite amount of time for data
collection or a limited number of people who could be interviewed or observed” (p.
27), and case study represents an intensive, holistic description and analysis of the
single phenomenon (ibid). As case study approach also characteristically enables
information to be collected from multiple data collection instruments and sources, I
was thus able to obtain in-depth data about a small number of cases and compare
the cases (Creswell, 2007).