For this week’s theme I’ve read an article called “Combining Real and Virtual Volunteers through Social Media” by Christian Reuter, Oliver Heger, Volkmar Pipek. The article was about volunteering during catastrophes and looked into how Twtter was used during the tornado in the U.S in April 2011. I also read an article called ” ‘Breaking Ground’ in the use of social media: A case study of a university earthquake response to inform educational design with Facebook” by Nick Dabner.
Questions regarding the first paper:
- Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
The methods used in this paper were focus groups, interviews and observations. Focus groups are conversation in groups, following questions selected by the researchers. Interviews are for one person at a time who answers a different set of questions. Observation is observing a user pattern in its natural form without interfering, in this case observing the twitter use - what is written, by whom, what different kinds of user patterns are there and how are people engaged in different ways?
I think the benefit of interviewing is that you collect opinion and other people's’ thoughts and get depletive answers. The limitation is that it requires skills to interview - if you don’t do it correctly you might ask leading question and interfere with the result. A limitation could also be that it’s time consuming since it also requires scheduling, in contrast to questionnaires which could be filled in at any time in any place. It takes additional work when you get information orally since it needs to be processed and transcripted after the interview has taken place.
The same goes for focus groups. A benefit with focus groups is that the conversation can take new turns when many minds contribute to the conversation with different points of views. Again, scheduling might be a limitation, and affecting others opinion.
Observation is a great tool in itself, but you need to have some sort of idea how to organise what you observe - otherwise you just have a ton of data. What is it you are looking for specifically?
- What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
To me, it was difficult to know when observations according to other methods or standards are qualitative or quantitative. If you observe a behaviour and write it down according to specific parameters to arrange the data, is it still qualitative? When I read about the observation part of qualitative research, it became more clear that qualitative research isn’t just about talking - it can also be about actions. I’ve always thought that qualitative research is built on people expressing opinion.
- Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
There are too many tweets from this kind of event to be able to go through them all, which is a limitation for the study.
Questions regarding the second paper:
- Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
A case study is a research method investigating a specific question. It’s in depth and narrowed down, and also convenient to test hypothesis on the real world.
- 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.
For this, I read another article about social media use during crisis - in this case the earthquake in New Zealand in 2010 and the university of Canterbury’s use of Facebook as communication platform. The study was made with the intention to inform of how the university used social media during this time. My own thoughts on the article is wondering what the point is of writing a scientific paper on an area you already know the answer to - how to use social media is probably not news to anyone today. Maybe it was different in New Zealand in 2012, since the article goes under the name “‘Breaking Ground’ in the use of social media: A case study of a university earthquake response to inform educational design with Facebook”.
A weakness of the paper was that the survey only included interviewing two people and looking at how the Facebook page for the emergency was used. A strength for the study was its combination of qualitative and quantitative data, even though it could have gathered more data.
I think this article was written to evaluate the university’s emergency response and to inform that the university handled it well. I think it gave interesting background facts on social media and interesting thoughts on how it was used, but since the author was highly involved in the situation and also writes about his own experience it doesn’t feel like an objective study.
This leaves me with the question - can research in form of a case study and evaluation of a specific case be the same thing?
Sources:
‘Breaking Ground’ in the use of social media: A case study of a university earthquake response to inform educational design with Facebook - Nick Dabner
“Combining Real and Virtual Volunteers through Social Media” - Christian Reuter, Oliver Heger, Volkmar Pipek
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