Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research pre-reflection

Qualitative Methods

I have read a paper from the journal "Media, Culture and Society" on trying to find characteristics of emerging adults who do not use social-media. This is done through identifying non-adopters from a large corpus of interviews not intended for this research (National Study of Youth and Religion, NSYR), but still including relevant information. In this corpus, 20 persons of equally varying gender are identified as not users of social-media (Facebook or Myspace) and their interviews are used in the study. The results from the deep-analysis of these interviews are then compared to four random picked social-media users groups (20 persons per group), to confirm the differentiating characteristics of the non-adopters.

This article uses the qualitative methods: Interviews and content analysis. Since the authors did not perform the interviews, I would consider the main method used to be content analysis, but since they are still interviews, the fact remains. The benefit of using these methods in this research is mainly due to the external research material. Interview design and gathering interview subject can be very time consuming and using already collected data as in this research can enable the time to be spent on a deeper analysis or other important research methods. Because most emerging adults are social-media users, there are only a few non-adopters in the data. A quantitative method would not find any statistical significance while using qualitative method on the few non-adopters can gain the research much more material to work on.

On the other hand, using an existing interview corpus can also have its limitations. Since the corpus might be designed for a totally different purpose, the information might be biased towards the design purpose. Like in this research, one therefore needs to validate the results inside the population used to prevent this bias to be incorporated in the results.

The only critic I have on the research is also what is a limitation of the research. Since they separate social-media users and non-users through one question: "Do you ever use social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook?", social networking users that are using other social networking platforms that cannot be compared to Facebook or Myspace but that are still social networking platforms, are not taken into account. Social networking can also happen on forums, through email, dating sites etc. These two were by the time the two most popular networking platforms, but still there might be some relevance in comparing "social networking" to the two biggest ones.

Reference:

Bobkowski, Piotr, and Jessica Smith. "Social media divide: characteristics of emerging adults who do not use social network websites." Media, Culture & Society 35.6 (2013): 771-781.

Case Studies

A case study is a sort of qualitative study where the researchers concentrate on a specific case in creating theory. The case can either be created specifically for the research or an historic or past recorded event. For example, one could ones iPhone application through controlled app testing, where you aim to investigate if the interaction is good or not, or one could investigate the phenomena at the hostage taking at Norrmalmstorg (called the Norrmalmstorg rubbery), where the hostages sympathised with the hostage-takers. During the case you need to collect data in form of observations, questionnaires, interviews etc. that you later analyse in order to form some kind of theory. What is separating case studies from other studies is (inter alia) that case studies starts with a broader hypothesis than other studies. This broad hypothesis is later focused throughout the research with the help of collected data.

In media technology, it is more common to construct the cases since media research usually concerns on-going settings and situations. I have read the article "The Use of Instant Messaging in Working Relationship Development: A Case Study" where the authors try to investigate how instant messaging (IM) is used to create and how it improves or impair working relations inside or between departments and ranks. This is done through focusing on the case of a Korean tire company. The authors used interviews, surveys and social network analysis in the case study in order to triangulate, i.e. see if the same patterns cause by a specific phenomena show up in different analyse methods.

If you analyse the article in terms of the process that Eisenhardt suggests in the article, you see some similarities and some differences. It is of course difficult to follow the whole research process through the paper, since not all planning steps are recorded in the article, but some parts are mentioned. For example, the research questions are not (as Eisenhardt suggests) broad and quit focused, which is definitely a fall back compare to Eisenhardt. This results in no observations collected and therefore the research is not gaining as much as possible from the research method.

Reference:

Cho, Hee‐Kyung, Matthias Trier, and Eunhee Kim. "The use of instant messaging in working relationship development: A case study." Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication 10.4 (2005): 00-00.