All CA research starts from single-case analysis (SCA) so as not to lose participants’ orientations exhibited in the details of individual cases. However, SCA can itself be a publishable outcome of CA research. This chapter, first, illustrates how previous SCA research has extracted candidate interactional practices and procedures, whose elaboration is left to subsequent research, and/or has advanced challenging claims concerning various human and social scientific concepts (such as grammar and action), using the previously explicated practices and procedures as analytic tools. Then, it demonstrates how SCA proceeds, and argues that the strength of SCA lies in its capacity to dig deeply into all the details of each case. Exploring the depth of a single case and examining various cases of a phenomenon are alternative methods for increasing the groundedness of the claims being advanced. Finally, the chapter suggests the possibility of applying SCA to practical issues.

Much CA research is grounded in specimen collections, which are numerically modest by the standards of survey research or corpus linguistics, but substantial relative to observational fieldwork. The appeal of collection-based methods is that they afford some of the advantages of context-sensitive case analysis, while also enabling the development of accounts whose generality may be tested across a number of cases. They have a particular utility for the investigation of novel phenomena in areas whose elementary units and basic organizational forms are not well-understood. This chapter reflects on key issues involved in both assembling and working through specimen collections. Regarding the assembly of cases, it is argued that researchers should cast a wide net across a diversity of data sources, taking care to avoid allowing hunches or hypotheses to gain a controlling influence over data collection. Regarding the investigation of patterns across cases, the discussion touches on the utility of single case analyses, systematic reviews of the entire collection, and various approaches to dealing with anomalous cases. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the limitations of prototypical specimen collections, identifying conditions when it may be advisable to augment a collection by adding cases beyond the target phenomenon.