| Dave, I'm worried about our case study. |
| I've done a bit of reading, but I'm not sure what's involved in actually writing a case study. |
| I missed the lecture where Dr Baker talked us through it. |
| OK, well it's quite straightforward. |
| We've got our focus - that's tourism at the Horton Castle site. |
| And you said you'd done some reading about it. |
| Yes, I found some articles and made notes of the main points. |
| Did you remember to keep a record of where you got the information from? |
| Sure. |
| I know what a pain it is when you forget that. |
| OK, so we can compare what we've read. |
| Then we have to decide on a particular problem or need at our site. |
| And then think about who we're going to interview to get more information. |
| OK. |
| So who'd that be? |
| The people who work there? |
| And presumably some of the tourists too? |
| Yes, both those groups. |
| So we'll have to go to the site to do that, I suppose. |
| But we might also do some of our interviewing away from the site - |
| we could even contact some people here in the city, |
| like administrators involved in overseeing tourism. |
| OK. So we'll need to think about our interview questions and... |
| fix times and places for the meetings. |
| It's all going to take a lot of time. |
| And if we can, we should ask our interviewees if they can bring along some numerical data |
| that we can add to support our findings. |
| And photographs? |
| I think we have plenty of those already. |
| But Dr Baker also said |
| we have to establish with our interviewees whether we can identify them in our case study, |
| or whether they want to be anonymous. |
| Oh, I wouldn't have thought of that. |
| OK, once we've got all this information, I suppose we have to analyse it. |
| Yes, put it all together and choose what's relevant to the problem we're focusing on, |
| and analyse that carefully to find out if we can identify any trends or regularities there. |
| That's the main thing at this stage, rather than concentrating on details or lots of facts. |
| OK. And then once we've analysed that, what next? |
| Well, then we need to think about what we do with the data we've selected |
| to make it as clear as possible to our readers. |
| Things like graphs, or tables, or charts. |
| Right. |
| Then the case study itself is mostly quite standard; |
| we begin by presenting the problem, and giving some background, |
| then go through the main sections, |
| but the thing that surprised me is that in a normal report |
| we'd end with some suggestions to deal with the problem or need we identified, |
| but in a case study we end up with a question or a series of questions to our readers, |
| and they decide what ought to be done. |
| Oh, I hadn't realised that. |
| So basically, the problem we're addressing in our case study of the Horton Castle site |
| is why so few tourists are visiting it. |
| And we'll find out more from our interviews, |
| but I did find one report on the internet that suggested that one reason might be because... |
| as far as transport goes, access is difficult. |
| I read that too, but that report was actually written ten years ago, |
| when the road there was really bad, but that's been improved now. |
| And I think there's plenty of fascinating stuff there for a really good day out, |
| but you'd never realise it from the castle website - |
| maybe that's the problem. |
| Yes, it's really dry and boring. |
| I read somewhere a suggestion that what the castle needs is a visitor centre. |
| So we could have a look for some information about that on the internet. |
| What would we need to know? |
| Well, who'd use it for a start. |
| It'd be good to know what categories the visitors fell into too, |
| like school parties or retired people, |
| but I think we'd have to talk to staff to get that information. |
| OK. And as we're thinking of suggesting a visitor centre |
| we'd also have to look at potential problems. |
| I mean, obviously it wouldn't be cheap to set up. |
| No, but it could be a really good investment. |
| And as it's on a historical site it'd need to get special planning permission, I expect. |
| That might be hard. |
| Right, especially as the only possible place for it would be at the entrance, |
| and that's right in front of the castle. |
| But it could be a good thing for the town of Horton. |
| At present it's a bit of a ghost town. |
| Once they've left school and got any skills or qualifications, |
| the young people all get out as fast as they can to get jobs in the city, |
| and the only people left are children and those who've retired. |
| Right. |
| Something else we could investigate would be the potential damage that tourists might cause to the castle site, |
| I mean their environmental impact. |
| At present the tourists can just wander round wherever they want, |
| but if numbers increase, there might have to be some restrictions, like sticking to marked ways. |
| And there'd need to be guides and wardens around to make sure these were enforced. |
| Yes, we could look at that too. |
| OK, well... |