case

case
Any single unit selected for observation or analysis by a researcher. For example, in a study of the division of household tasks among eighty couples, each couple would constitute a separate case. Similarly, in a sample survey, individual respondents or interviewees are cases. Cross-national comparative analysis might feature nations as cases. In contingency tables, the total number of cases is conventionally indicated by a lower-case letter n, as in ‘n = 1350’.