måndag 26 oktober 2015
måndag 19 oktober 2015
Post: Theme 6
This week, the theme has been qualitative research and case studies. I read two articles which I’ve described in my pre-post. I worked from the questions we got from the assignment and answered them after what I found in the articles. At the end of the week, I attended a seminar and discussed the questions.
So what have I learned this week? Did I come to any new conclusions?
Yes and no. As I wrote last week, these methods are not new to me and therefore not as eye-opening. I realized though, that qualitative data often is transferred into quantitative data to be able to handle it and make generalizations. I’ve also been thinking about how convenient quantitative data is, but how qualitative data can be more interesting as a reader. This is my personal opinion, even though I’m a big fan of statistics it’s interesting to read how people express themselves and their opinion. People are complex.
So this week we’ve talked about how the combination of qualitative and quantitative is fruitful, and I think that’s the most common approach when doing a study. One is not better than the other, they are useful in different ways. The combination is often used in case studies. I think the seminar provided a better understanding of case studies in general, as I understand it now a case study is to investigate specific situations to gain knowledge. Therefore, a case study can consist of only one participant, for example if you study someone with a rare disease. This is different from most studies we’ve talked about previously since we often emphasize on collecting a lot of data to ensure the results that in turn strengthens a theory. A case study can be more difficult to redo as well. If you investigate in a catastrophy situation, as the study I read for this seminar did, you can't really go back and re-live the situation. The material you collected during the period is what you have.
måndag 12 oktober 2015
Post Theme 5: Design research
This week, the theme has been design research and I've read a couple of articles and attended a lecture. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend both but I asked a friend for some notes from the on I missed to be able to somewhat include it in my discussion today.
The first lecture discussed the importance of the question you are looking into - how you formulate it affects the entire study and needs to be precise. Without knowing the problem, you can’t solve it. This was emphasized a lot when we did the bachelor thesis work, and formulating the question properly helps narrowing down the subject into what is relevant. Numbers from the lecture, which I think are more figurative than scientifictly ensured, said that 90% of the importance is defining the problem and 10% to actually solve it. Formulating the problem is key.
During the second lecture, we talked about design research and prototypes. To me, making a difference between prototypes in industry and in research was new. I hadn’t thought about it before but it’s true that they are used in different ways. In research, a prototype is more about finding answers, solving problems and to gain knowledge. In industry it’s to prove a concept, to test an idea and to evaluate it. A difference might be that a prototype in the industry is made to be used later on. When I wrote the pre-post, I wrote with the perspective of prototypes in industry.
During the second lecture, we talked about design research and prototypes. To me, making a difference between prototypes in industry and in research was new. I hadn’t thought about it before but it’s true that they are used in different ways. In research, a prototype is more about finding answers, solving problems and to gain knowledge. In industry it’s to prove a concept, to test an idea and to evaluate it. A difference might be that a prototype in the industry is made to be used later on. When I wrote the pre-post, I wrote with the perspective of prototypes in industry.
From what I've heard at a seminar with Ilias, lots of time can be spent on the design of a study - even years. To spend that much time on design is crazy to me, but I understand why the design is important. I think the idea of piloting a design before using it is wise, to get feedback on how the study is made, and it's something I wish I did when we made some research last year. That way, when you actually start the study you don't make errors in the beginning.
söndag 11 oktober 2015
fredag 9 oktober 2015
Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research
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
måndag 5 oktober 2015
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