Case Study and Randomized Control Trial RCT Research Designs for Educational Leadership and Management Studies

It is becoming increasingly important for researchers to critically reflect on a set of research questions relevant to their own area of research that can have a positive impact on complex social phenomena, such as school leadership and management development outcomes of school leaders. This paper discusses about randomized control trial and case study enables the researcher to answer research questions within the effectiveness of leadership development of Cameroonian school leaders, in the real world, presents new challenges for collecting data and verifying inferences from these data. Many educational leadership researchers seem to have high hopes that such approaches using quasi-experimental, randomized control trails can give positive research outcomes when it comes to educational leadership development of school leaders. It is noted that case study research is more than simply to data collection, analysis, and report writing differing from the traditional, randomized control trial in terms of issues such as rigour, practicality, ethics, sampling, and validity are of great importance and perhaps of special relevance to researchers in Cameroon, and to the African context in which we work. This paper provides a further distinction between randomized control trial and case study research designs. This paper also presents a summary of the different research designs to conduct research in quantitative and qualitative and mixed methods studies.