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]
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]
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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]
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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[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
Hi,
SvaraRaderaI have chosen that same paper for case study as you did. I have similar reflection about the strengths and weaknesses of the paper. I think paper was quiet well-organized and use more or less all the steps of Eisenhardt's table. The only thing that they just focused on big pizza's chains, and didn't compare their literature with other conflicting literature means they didn't use any logic cross cases. I also liked you definition of case study, its very simple and easy to digest for first year students :) It seems that you understood this theme deeply!