Theme 6 - Reflection

In the last seminar with Leif Dahlberg we discussed qualitative studies and case studies, but the focus was mainly on case studies. A case study is a study to get a deeper understanding about a specific case and not a subject. It’s a study in a specific location and time, and it often contains both quantitative and qualitative methods.

I’ve learned that you don’t really need to know what you’re looking for in the beginning of the case study-process and you don’t even need to define a problem. Many times the researchers only have an idea before they, often in teams, starts to study different cases. A case study should have open-ended questions and not any questions where one can simple answer yes or no. Leif also told us that a case study and a field study are very similar to each other. One difference between the two studies is that a field study is often done by one person and a case study is often done in teams.

In the seminar we also talked in smaller groups about the course as a whole. My group discussed whether this course should be placed before or after doing our bachelor thesis. We thought that the knowledge we’ve gained about different methods during this course could have been useful before doing the bachelor thesis. But on the other hand, taking this course after the bachelor thesis made it easier to relate to the different methods that we’ve discussed. Overall I think that this is a useful course since it teaches about many types of methods which will be applicable when doing my master thesis.  

Theme 5 - Reflection

To this weeks theme, which was design research, we had two lectures. One with Eva-Lotta Sallnäs and one with Haibo Li. Unfortunately I missed the lecture with Eva-Lotta Sallnäs due to illness but I went to Haibos lecture. He talked about five important steps in design research:

• How to come up with an idea?
• How to filter an idea?
• How to validate an idea?
• How to evaluate an idea?
• How to communicate an idea?

Before this week I answered a couple of questions (in a previous blog post) that were connected to some of these steps. So, some of the things he mentioned I had already thought about but other things were new to me. For example, I hadn’t thought about how to filter an idea so I found that part really interesting. It was also interesting to listen to how we should communicate our research. He said that it’s important not to talk as a professor or a salesman but to talk as an entrepreneur.

I like this lecture because it was a brief explanation of some of the things you should think about when going from an idea to a prototype.   

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

Part 1

Paper: Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube
Journal/Impact factor: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication/2.019
Summary of the research: This study examine how YouTube participants develop and maintain social networks by manipulate physical and interpretive access to their videos. The result shows that there is different degrees of “publicness” in video sharing. Some users had “publicly private” behavior meaning  you can see the video makers’ identities but that the content isn’t accessible by everyone, and some had “privately public” behavior which means sharing accessible video content with many viewers but limiting the access to information about the video makers’ identities. [1]

1. Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

The qualitative methods in this paper are interviews, observations and analyses of video content, comments, subscription and friending practices. The benefit with interviews is that it’s easy to get a deeper knowledge because if it appears questions during the interview the researchers can ask right away. The limitation is that the researchers might interpret the answers subjectively. The benefit with observations is that there is often no time limit, you can observe for a long time, several years if you want to. The limitations are that they can be time consuming and cost a lot of money. The benefit with analyses is that trustworthy data easily can be collected and the limitation is that it can take much time to collect all the needed data.

2. What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?

When reading this paper I learned that some qualitative methods can require very long time, for example observations. In this study the researcher observed YouTube-channels once a week for one year. A longer observation-period makes the findings more reliable, but it also requires time and patience.

3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

Many of the qualitative methods that were used can be subjectively interpreted by the only researcher. I think that this could have been improved with more researchers so that the different interpretations could be discussed. With only one researcher its difficult to discuss them.

Part 2

1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.

A case study is a research strategy to get more deeper understanding about the phenomenon you’re examine. Case studies involve either single or multiple cases and numerous levels of analysis. In such a study it’s common to combine different data collection methods (surveys, interviews, observations etc.). The goal of a case study is often to provide description or to test- or generate theory.

2. Use the "Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research" (Eisenhardt, summarized in Table 1) to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your selected paper.

Paper: Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry
Journal/Impact factor: International Journal of Information Management/2.042
Summary of the research: This case study aims to help companies understand how to analyze their and other companies content on social media sites to increase the competitive advantage. The researchers are doing a case study which applies text mining to analyze unstructured text content on Facebook and Twitter sites of three different pizza companies: Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza and Papa John’s Pizza. This study shows the importance of social media competitive analysis and that text mining is good when extracting business value from large amount of social media data. [2]

The strengths:
- Early on the authors define what questions they are going to focus on. According to Eisenhardt [3] this is good since without a research focus it’s easy to drown in all the available data. When wanting to study a certain field its good to narrow it down with a few research-questions.
- They also described what companies they were about to study and why they chose those companies, therefore they wasn’t randomly selected.
-  They were multiply (three) investigators when doing this study. This means that the sites could be viewed from different perspectives which makes it easier to find patterns, which was the goal of this search. It also makes it easier in the beginning of the study because they can have different insights and ideas.

The weaknesses:
- One weakness is that there wasn’t any comparison with conflicting theories/literature which would build internal validity and raise the theoretical level of the paper.
- This study only have 3 cases (three pizza companies) which according to Eisenhardt should be between 4 and 10. Less than 4 cases can make it more difficult to achieve theory with complexity and the empirical grounding can become unconvincing.

--------------

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00400.x/pdf
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com.focus.lib.kth.se/science/article/pii/S0268401213000030
[3] http://www.jstor.org.focus.lib.kth.se/stable/258557

Theme 4 - Reflection

The theme this week was quantitative research and it was very interesting according to me. When I did my bachelor thesis I used a quantitative method - a survey. Before we decided to use a survey we read a lot about both quantitative and qualitative methods to find the most useful one to our study. So, discussing it again was really interesting. It was also very useful to discuss pros and cons of quantitative and qualitative methods since I’m going to do my master thesis next year. Therefore it’s still a very relevant subject for me.

I really like this weeks theme. It’s something that I understand and can relate a great deal to. It’s also something that I find very useful for my future studies and future work. Being able to recognize the differences between the two types of methods and when a quantitative method is the best alternative or when a qualitative method should be selected could be crucial for a well performed research. It’s safe to say that I learned a lot about quantitative and qualitative research this week.

Theme 5: Design research

1. How can media technologies be evaluated?

I think that media technologies need to have a prototype in its early state of evaluation because of different reasons. Firstly, the design needs to be appealing and it’s not that simple to explain how the product in question will look like without having a showable prototype. It’s also important that the technology is both user-friendly and easy to use so that it doesn’t arise any questions when using it. By letting people do a think-aloud analysis (meaning that when they’re testing the prototype they directly tell you what they liked and didn’t like about it) it’s easy to get direct feedback. Haibo Li et al. also did a survey which is a good compliment to the prototype-tests.

2. What role will prototypes play in research?

Prototypes can play an important role in research because it gives the evaluator a better understanding. When testing an idea of a product on someone it’s much easier to instead of saying “it will most likely have these features” show them a prototype or mock-up and let them try for themselves. In some researches it’s difficult to develop a prototype to examine the main questions, for example, when wanting to study the relationship between Facebook-use and the establishing and maintenance of social capital there’s no need for a prototype. But when examine a future product or application a prototype can come in handy.

3. Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?

I understood “proof of concept prototype” as a way to demonstrate a concept using a prototype. It could be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype to test the idea more thorough. The concept alone can sometimes be difficult to visualize and therefore it’s good to develop a proof of concept prototype.  

4. What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

The characteristic is that a prototype might lack some of the features or is a simplified version of the product. The limitations with a prototype are that it is an extra cost to produce them and you may not discover all the possible defects. Testing a prototype isn’t a guarantee to find all the things that need to be changed before developing the final product.  

5. How can design research be communicated/presented?

I think that prototypes and mock-ups is great for presenting design research because this makes it easier for people to test and evaluate them. Another way is to demonstrate the concept/prototype/mock-up with explanations and images.

How does a collaborative setting differ from a single user setting as regards methodology used and the results obtained?

A “collaborative setting” is when many users are using multiple devices and a “single user setting” is when only one device is used, if I understand it correctly. The difficulty with a collaborative setting, and the difference between a collaborative and a single user setting, is that with many devices and many users the challenges to collect useful data becomes more confounded. If, for example, different users are testing a prototype on different computers the results might get affected in a way that they won’t if only using one device.

How can qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study complement each other?

Quantitative methods are often used to get an overall and general answer. Qualitative methods are used for more exploratory purposes, to do deeper analyses on selected case-studies. For example, a quantitative method could be used for answering questions like how many teenages read books and a qualitative method could answer questions like what does books mean for teenagers. To use both a qualitative and a quantitative method in the same study can often be useful. A qualitative method can tell us what the findings in a quantitative method means. It can analyze the general findings on a more deeper level.

How can using both subjective and objective methods give a better understanding of a phenomenon?

To understand a phenomenon we need to use both subjective and objective methods. The objective methods are for example collected data and measurements and the subjective methods are the observers personal judgement and experiences. We often need the data and measurements as a starting point when understanding a phenomenon and then we study them and use our knowledge, judgement and experiences to understand them.