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.