First year experience - Science topic

Since vocabulary knowledge can be at different levels of depth (form recognition - meaning recognition - productive), I would suggest you start by having a look at (the relativley simple to make) Vocabulary Knowledge Scale type tests:

Wesche, M., & Paribakht, T. S. (1996). Assessing second language vocabulary knowledge: Depth versus breadth. Canadian Modern Language Review, 53, 13–40.

Hi Kathryn,

First of all, congratulations and best wishes for taking up this challenging topic. I am a PhD student myself and I have been pursuing my doctoral research on social entrepreneurship since 2014. And I am doing case study research. I must say that I agree pretty much to what Frederic has said above. I would now share my thoughts below.

First of all, I do not think there is any methodology paper on case studies in social entrepreneurship; though there are past publications on cases of social enterprises. Quite consequentially, there are no best practice examples. Therefore, you have to decide for yourself, which published case stands as a good example for you. I had looked in qualitative research papers on entrepreneurship in order to frame my methodology. I recommend you have a look at a special issue of the Journal of Business Venturing, which was on qualitative research in entrepreneurship.

At the same time, I would request you to please be comfortable with the case study method, and do not bother about criticism. I understand that in universities we have groups of people (gatekeepers) who advocate methodologies of their choice, and criticize methodologies practiced by others. I must say that there is no methodology in research that can not be criticized; if one can prove the existence of such a methodology, that person would be given a Nobel Prize. For justifying the impact and relevance of case study research, you will find many qualitative research papers, including Eisenhardt. 

I observe that you have spoken of only case study here, and seek to justify its usage. I have an approach towards this issue, based on my own experience. On the field, you would probably be using not just one method, but multiple methods, leading to data as well as method triangulation. I experienced that in the context of an emerging economy like India. I am not sure how different it will be there. But my experience had been a mix of ethnography, FGDs, and Interviews, to explore my area of inquiry, which is understanding how social enterprises create their markets and social value. Case study had only been the approach, as the unit of analysis is an organisation, and not individual. It is the triangulation of methods within the boundaries of case study that will bring rigor in your work. However, once you do such triangulation of methods within a case, it can take you more than a year to do even three cases. Three in-depth cases are much more interesting and contributing to theory development, rather than more numbers and lesser depth. Even if the cases are of start-up social enterprises, your ethnography and interview transcriptions can go on for several hours, as you experience what they experience, for days together. After all, qualitative research is not for generalization; but for proposing theory that can be later built into a scale for testing its statistical generalisability. 

I hope I have been able to clarify your doubts. Social entrepreneurship is very close to my heart. I have spent days at the grassroots, seeing the change that these enterprises are bringing for those who have been traditionally left out by corporations. Change is here; it is the future. We can talk further on email and exchange papers as and when we come across, so that we can help each other's research. I can be reached at subhanjan.sengupta@gmail.com and subhanjan.sengupta@bimtech.ac.in.

Best Wishes and Regards,

Subhanjan Sengupta

New Delhi