Systems engineering activities focuses mainly on objective perspectives which can be measured and verified but largely ignores subjective aspects. As systems become more complex, the interactions between humans and systems are also important. There are social influences in a multidisciplinary engineering team and the implication is that a system engineer must be responsible for understanding these social influences on the development and operation of a system. This requires a qualitative method of enquiry. In this paper qualitative methods are briefly introduced and the detailed application of the case study method and its limitations are discussed. The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Project was used as the case study and the research design and data collection considerations for the study are presented. One of the study's research question (How is the development process structured in the project and why?) is used to illustrate the data analysis and discussion.