Last post of the course

You should write a 1000 word commentary in which you reflect about different ways of combining different methods in order to answer complex research questions.

The course began with a deep dive into a more philosophical approach to reflecting about knowledge – something that was new to me, and not necessarily something that was easy to grasp. However, it did add a new layer of thinking for me, and I gained insight into how to reflect upon the world around us, and especially knowledge. Many times in an engineering education, the answers are black or white – right or wrong (take for example math, given a specific equation there is a right answer and many wrong answers). This course opened up a new way of thinking, what is right and what is wrong – is there such a thing, can we objectively say that anything is right?  Our a posteriori knowledge is something that must be examined in order to understand how we reflect on certain questions – and other people who do not share that knowledge must gain a larger understanding of what you are presenting, in order to understand.

The course continued with more philosophical questions such as enlightenment, dialectic discussions and nominalism. This was also something that can be applied to just about anything and is an important aspect to bring with you when trying to contribute to the human pool of knowledge.

I would say that after the above, the course became more and more relatable over the last few weeks. Discussing theory, quantitative research, qualitative research, design and case studies were all more tangible for an engineering student than the philosophical questions that began the course. Since most (if not all) who read this course have written a bachelor’s thesis, we had previous experience in these fields, which I felt was applicable when reading about the texts prior to the seminars.

However, with the above being said, and the extremely interesting aspects of this entire course – it is not until you can combine all 6 seminars that you truly have an understanding of how you as an individual can contribute to knowledge by answering complex research questions. By first having a grasp of the philosophical aspects, and actually asking yourself what knowledge you want to contribute with, how yourself will be colored by your life experience, and how to avoid nuancing your research given the lens you view the world with.  Ask yourself question such as “Do I have any previous experience of this subject, and how will that affect my approach to this question?” or “What exactly am I trying to contribute here, and how should I best approach the problem?”. When you have answers to the above, you can apply the second half of the course – trying to come up with new theories of different aspects of life by using either qualitative or quantitative methods (or maybe even a mix of both). There are many methods which can be applied to solving the hypothesis you have, for example using quantitative measurements (raw data put into a context), qualitative measurements (interviews, participant overviews, focus groups and so on).

Continuing on how to answer the research questions – once you have all of the tools given to you, and you have been defining the question and the method to use in order to best achieve the answer, the next step is to “get your hands dirty” and get to work. Define what you are trying to answer (by using a more philosophical approach to knowledge and a priori/a posteriori knowledge), start looking at which methods to combine in order to best answer the question (quantitative measurements? Qualitative? Design research? Case studies? A combination of them?). It is important for the researcher to know that there might not be a right answer on which path to take, but having all of the tools in your arsenal will help you choose the path which best fulfills your needs – every research question will have a different approach to how to answer it. A subject that has been brought up by me and my course mates has been that of objectivity versus subjectivity – and the impossible task of being entirely objective when conducting research. And to me, it is quite clear that it is impossible to be 100% objective – but due to the philosophical part of this course, and what true knowledge might be (and might not be), you have a better understanding of how to become more objective. And from a reader perspective, knowing that every paper out there is not entirely objective is also important to know – and use that knowledge to take the core of the paper with a grain of salt, and form your own opinion of what is being presented.

I think another very important part of this course is the entire structure of first reading texts, followed by a lecture, then a seminar and finally a follow-up post. The structure ensured that we view the week’s content at hand through many different aspects – and we were given the chance to first gain our own perspective of the literature, followed by gaining insight into how other students and teachers viewed it. By combining all of these perspectives, you had a better opportunity of defining how you want to view it yourself.

I want to wrap up with the point that I have been trying to get across through this post – which is that there is no “one size fits all” approach to how to answer the complex research questions you form. And there will never objectively be a correct way of answering one, but with that in mind, you have the possibility to use different approaches to answering them and create your own combination of what the best suitable approach might be. A course like this one has opened my eyes to different perspectives I had never thought about previously, and it is exactly that types of perspectives that is essential in answering research questions – the knowledge of all of these different approaches. 

Post theme 6.

This week was interesting, as case studies were somewhat new to me. The first part of this weeks seminar regarding qualitative measurements was something that to most was something familiar – as was the case for me. Before the seminar, I wondered quite a bit regarding the fact that I had such a hard time finding a qualitative study in one of the few journals I was looking at. During the seminar, I brought up that point, and Ilias had quite an interesting view of how different “schools” of journals have different approaches for which type of measurement should be used. For example, some journals might be of the viewpoint that qualitative measurements far outweigh quantitative – whereas another, similar journal, might have the exact opposite view. This was very interesting to me, and something I had not really considered before the seminar. It’s also a very important aspect to have in mind when reading looking for specific papers regarding a subject – that depending on the journal you are reading through; you might find completely different approaches to how to find the “correct” answer. That is something that I will definitely have in the back of my mind when conducting my master’s thesis, in order to find the most appropriate papers related to what I am writing.

The second subject of this week, case studies, were new to me – and made for a very interesting reading and learning experience. The fact that case studies are in a specific context helps you gain a better understanding of how people act/behave – and they can be crucial for understanding human behavior. For example, case studies when it comes to horrific events such as war or natural disasters can help us gain important information on how to act and relay information in case of those events. This in hand can be of substantial help when preparing for those events – knowing how humans will behave or act, so that the government or other organizations can help. When it comes to media technology, case studies can be crucial in understanding how different mediums are used based on the context. One example that I can think of is how humans use different platforms (mobile, desktop, laptop) depending on the time of day – and because of that, news sources can adapt the content throughout the day to their readers. The reason for this knowledge might very well be case studies on how tablets/phones etc. are used throughout the day.

An interesting discussion during the seminar was how the word “case” in case studies relates to how it is often used in an educational/business environment – and how they differentiate. In the educational/business environment, case normally refers to a specific situation (such as how Spotify grew its user base during a specific time, or how the iPad was a huge success) – which is quite different from how the word is used in the case study subject. It’s important to differentiate the two, to avoid misconceptions of what you are communicating. 

 Post theme 5.

This week’s seminar was regarding Design Research, which to me was a quite new subject – something I found to be very interesting. The assigned articles for the week were of experiments where design research was used as the way to achieve a result. One of the primary questions of the week – “What is the 'empirical data' in these two papers?” was to me quite hard to answer, simply because I had no previous experience, I thought of all of the data being taken into consideration when designing these processes to be the empirical data. I still hold true to that opinion, but I would like to expand it to also include all of the data that is documented when doing these experiments, as well as the prototypes, cases and so on which are all essential to design research. Another aspect which I now understand better is one of the key differences between design research and design in general. When designing a new product, whatever it is, the key focus is always to try to optimize the product in some sense (usability, looks, performance) and so on – which in most cases is done entirely to get a better product, which results in a greater chance of it being bought (increasing revenue). Design research on the other hand, I would argue, is more focused on discovering behaviors, attitudes, trends etc. when it comes to different topics – which can then be used to actually optimize the process itself.

One of the key similarities between the above mentioned topics, I would argue, is that context is essential – and that it might be impossible to replicate a design research. What I mean with this is the fact that the artifacts which are being looked at are bound by a specific substructure and superstructure which is always subject to change. And if either the substructure or superstructure changes, the results of an identical (method-wise) design research are subject to change – and therefor might not be replicable.

The above is also a reason that I am eager to change my mind regarding if design research can be looked at as knowledge contribution. I hold true to my statement that design research CAN be seen as design research, but it has to be clear that the knowledge contributed is bound by time and the artifacts. The knowledge gathered today is something that can change in the future, and the knowledge gathered years ago has a good chance to be outdated today – however, the results of design research do in fact answer where our knowledge is at today, at this given time. However, a key aspect is that you can always try to replicate the outcome of a study by changing the means, and the process. However, I think that one of the difficulties of design research is that there are an endless amount of ways to approach a design research, and it is impossible to objectively answer which one is better. You can always strive to optimize a process, but you can never objectively answer if you are “correct” or not.

To me, this week was very interesting as it brought up a new subject for me – which I say can contribute to my future research where it is applicable.

Theme 6 - Qualitative and case study research

For this week’s topic, I had a hard time finding a qualitative research paper, which was rater surprising for me. I looked through around 20-30 articles in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and quickly glanced at the method to understand how it had been conducted. From my experience, papers have a mix between quantitative and qualitative, but to my surprise – almost all of them were purely quantitative.

I ended up taking one of the articles from the list of examples provided by the course administrator and took the one called “Connected scholars: Examining the role of social media in research practices of faculty using the UTAUT model”, published in Computers in Human Behavior, which has an impact factor of 2.880. The reason I chose this article was due to the fact that they stated the following:

“The study is based on the content analysis of 51 semi-structured interviews of scholars in the Information Science and Technology field.”

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

As I mentioned above, the reason for choosing this article was due to the fact that they conducted semi-structured interviews, which is something which I did when performing my bachelor’s degree. Semi-conducted interviews are interviews which have somewhat “loose” questions, which the people being interviewed have to fill in the blanks. The reason for this is to not supply the interviewees with the answers – rather you try to point them in a train of thought, which they have to answer themselves. From doing some research of my own, this is a good way of getting specific information about a subject without steering the answers yourself. You get a broader understanding of a specific question for the target audience of the article – in this case the scholars. A limitation which might be applicable to this method is the fact that you only have a limited amount of data to work with, for a specific target audience – which means you can’t draw general conclusions.

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

Apart from learning more about the usage of semi-structured interviews, and how they actually took place in public – I learnt a lot about how to interpret the results of the interviews. To me, it was quite difficult to draw conclusions based on interviews, since these were individual’s opinions. However, in this article they use individual quotes to categorize answers – using the individual ones as a description of a general consensus, which to me was rather surprising.

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

I would say that the largest improvement-area is the lack of data. This specific paper had approximately 50 people who were interviewed. One idea might be to use a quantitative measurement, for example a survey, to a larger audience and use the interviews to answer the result of the survey. The second limitation was the fact that a lot of the people who were interviewed were at a specific conference – so the target audience was quite niched.

Case study.

The paper I chose to work with for the case study half of this week is called "The tweets that killed a university: A case study investigating theuse of traditional and social media in the closure of a state university". Published in the journal Computes in Human behavior (2.880 impact factor).

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

A case study is a way to research a specific study using pre-defined cases, and using these specific cases to gather and analyze data. The main benefit of using case studies is the fact that you get to place the subjects in a “real” context. These contexts may be a specific case, a subject, a situation etc (people, places, events). Cases are used when it is hard to differentiate a context without placing the subjects directly into it. Case studies are good when trying to come up to an answer for a specific question, but cannot be used in a general sense.

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.

I found it quite hard to use the process of building the case study hard to follow, as the article might not have had all the individual steps in the method. They analyzed the data and then went on to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. I do think that Eisenhardts table is an extremely good ground to build a case study on, but it has to be adapted to your specific subject, which might require some tweaking.

Post theme 4.

Sadly, there was no seminar this week to have discussions regarding the subjects which were at hand. With that said, it did feel like a seminar which was a lot easier to grasp than the previous ones. The reason for this being that both quantitative and qualitative research is something that students who are currently studying a master’s program has already undergone a bachelor’s degree – in which we wrote a thesis. When conducting our bachelor’s theses, we read some information regarding both of these subjects – so it was more tangible.

Without a seminar, it has been hard to have discussions regarding the subject – but I have tried discussing it with people who read the course last year to get some more insight into the area. And one of the recurring subjects has been how quantitative data is extremely hard to deal with in an objective meaning. No matter which pool of data you have, it is next to impossible to be completely objective about it, and put it into the exact context in which it belongs. One way of doing this is categorizing the data into different groups. An example could be that different answers would be categorized to “Positive”, “Negative” or “Neutral” depending on the type of data which was given. However, this is also a thin life to walk, and in the end these categorizations might come down personal interpretations – which might not be objective.

Because of the above, I have reflected about the fact that there might never be a completely objective approach to a problem, and in the end it all comes down to how the researchers decide to approach a problem and a data source. If researchers were to put an entire paper into context and be completely objective, it might need an entire book just to describe every single aspect of the context – which is absolutely impossible to achieve. So, as a reader of different papers it is always important to have your own critique of what is written and try to do your own analysis to find which “pit falls” might have been present when conducting the research.

I also think that the above highlights the fact that it is always important to use qualitative methods as well as quantitative – to try to reach one step closer to an objective answer.