One is the liveliest number: the case orientation of qualitative research.

The epistemological thrust of qualitative research is case oriented. Regardless of qualitative methodology or sample size, qualitative research is quintessentially about understanding a particular in the all-together. Regardless of the kind of analytic technique employed, qualitative analysis are obliged, first and foremost, to make sense of individual cases. Looking at and through each case in a qualitative project is the basis from which researchers may make idiographic generalizations and move to cross-case comparisons to construct aggregations, syntheses, or interpretations of data from and faithful to individual cases.