One obvious difference, which turns out to be specious, is that narrative is fiction and case study fact.  This is not always so because case study relies on narrative. Medical case studies, discussing the causes and symptoms of a disease, depend on different narrative conventions varying with the diverging, evolving conceptions of medicine in general: See Pedro Laín Entralgo, "La historia clínica: Historia y teoría" (2 vols., 1950) [The Case History: History and Theory].  Narrative, therefore, is a broader concept, embracing the case study as a specific kind of narrative. Narrative relates information usually in chronological sequence. Some narrative strives for aesthetic enjoyment in the narrative itself, while a case study generally has a specific purpose outside the narrative: to pinpoint and heal a disease (physical or social in a metaphorical sense),  to explain the motives of a crime, to account for convergences or divergences in a questionnaire, etc..

Non-faction case studies that I read and work on are slow to create narratives. Quick and dirty narratives, are often fiction. It is hard to write non-fiction and the background case studies as I studied in business school. following the Harvard and UCLA models., I decode ancient math  texts as originally written; the ancient narrative associated with each text offers a brief introduction to the statement of the problem, but it often  takes years to write the narrative that actually solves non-faction problems. For example, the Egyptian Mathematical Leather Roll  was unrolled in 1927, and its narrative continues to be undated adding new facts in revised narratives, by myself and others that read the EMLR's first, second and third levels, such as a 2014 update that was  sent off to an encyclopedia. published by Springer.

A 2014 non-faction narrative decodes the most basic form of Egyptian mathematics; 1/n rational numbers scaled to concise and awkward unit fraction series. https://www.academia.edu/5825764/Mathematics_in_Egypt_2014_Update_

that leads to concise 2/n rational numbers recorded by Ahmes 300 years latter.

The 2007 EMLR narrative may be of interest http://emlr.blogspot.com/

Archimedes' square root method is a case study. Its latest narrative may surprise a few readers: http://planetmath.org/egyptianandgreeksquareroot

There is some good work done on this problem in the medical humanities.  One place to start would be the coauthored book by Ron Schleifer (a literary and cultural theorist) and Jerry Vannatta (a physician and former medical school Dean), The Chief Concern of Medicine: The Integration of the Medical Humanities and Narrative Knowledge into Medical Practices, published by the U of Michigan Press.

I do not think that case study can be considered a specific kind of narrative. I think that it can be a specific discoursive genre, a specific way of speaking...

Thanks you for your great contributions - I am using narrative in my research following the narrative methodology of Clandinin and Connelly. However, I'm struggling to write up my research as I'm having difficulty moving beyond case study into a narrative style of telling the cases.

I would say simply, fiction. A case study may be questioned on the extent and exhaustiveness of the variables it is working with - and therefore the reliability of the interpretation offered. I don't usually question fiction in this way.

Thanks Anne-Marie,

A great strategy, I will explore using this. I'm using NVivo to assist with some of the analysis so being relatively new to this software I'm not fully aware of the usability of it for narrative.

Thanks Anne- Marie, much appreciated.

Good question! Simply put, narrative is descriptive (it tells things as they are). Case study is kind of empirical and analytical rather than descriptive/narrative.

poetry: fictio retorica musicaque poita ;)

I would recomend you to look into the work of Dwora Yanow, she does a lot of research that is interpretive and often single case. She is good at the logic behind case study design and intepretive methods. There is also a journal, Critical Policy Studies that often discuss narrative as a method,. I do not agrre with the simplification that narrative is descriptive and case study empirical?! analytical?!

Thank you Oscar. I haven't heard of the journal that you kindly suggested, I'll look it up.

Narrative study, is a qualitative research using personal expriencies, so on phenomenon are descripe in viws of the particular social and historical context. data tool is interview.

But case study are presented general views to one phenomenon. I understand that narrative study is a special form of case study. data tools, interview, qustionnaire, observation, fild note, memos ... 

best

Hi Michelle,

A case study is a research method involving an up-close, in-depth, and detailed examination of a subject of study as well as its related contextual conditions. Case studies are used to help you see how the complexities of real life influence decisions. It is taken from real life. It consists of many parts and each part usually ends with problems and points for discussion, and it includes sufficient information for the reader to treat problems and issues

Narrative is a way (maybe the most important one) to give sense to our personal (social-historical, too) experiences by telling stories about ourselves and the others.

'Narrative case study research: on endings and six session reviews' by Etherington and Bridges is an example which might help. Published in Counselling and Psychotherapy Research: 11,(1); 11-22. Downloadable on ResearchGate I beleive.

You can try and exceed the conventional definitions. It could be useful to try and explain what do you mean by a narrative in your work. However, you can read Meieke Bal and use her approach if you are set in using others' definitions.

I believe that your research problem, and more specifically your research question(s), dictates the selection of either case-study or narrative. It seems that case-study is a good approach if context is important to you but if a person and her/his assumptions, perceptions, and worldviews etc are important then you go for the narrative approach.

I would like to illustrate this through a much simplified example.

1. How, over the years, a particular person [named] developed into a leader? (Narrative Approach)

2. How individuals develop into leaders? (Phenomenological Approach)

3. How individuals develop into leaders in a particular organisational environment? (Case Study Approach)

4. How individuals develop into leaders in a particular culture? (Ethnographic Approach)

Researchers need to understand that the dichotomy between these qualitative approaches is not strict and that these approaches are mutually inclusive. Consider the following please:

How a particular individual [named], belonging to a particular cultural background, developed into a leader in a particular work environment? The approach adopted here will be a mix of narrative, ethnography, and case-study.

Thanks for the good feed back Sajid. Your advise is much helpful to finalise my methodology as Autobiographical case-study approach (for comperative analysis). Regards, Prem Kumar Student from MSVU, Canada but from India.

Reading scribal rational numbers as originally scaled by Least Common Multiples . LCMs .. was grossed missed and garbled in the 20th century. By 2004 the EMLR was proposed to be decoded by one and two LCMs. BY 2006 the RMP, Ahmes' Papyrus and its 2/n table, and data in 87 problems, was also decoded in this manner, hence confirming the 2004 proposal. Today, scribal number theory is found at the beginning of each RMP problem, often in-hard- to- read shorthand. Adding-back missing shorthand steps, it is clear that Ahmes included Old Kingdom duplation information as proofs, and not initial calculations, as 20th century scholars like Peet, Chace, Gillings, and many others had assumed in an additive context, and not now attested scribal number theory.

Narrative is an umbrella term whereascase study implies a number of articles concerning a certain literary wotk.