Qualitative and case study research
PART I
1. Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
The method
used in this paper is, as mentioned above, qualitative. The study is based on
interviews of 36 frequent Foursquare users about their mobile communication practices,
the interviews ranged from 25 to 90 minutes.
One benefit
of using a qualitative method is possibility to do deeper analyze; the
participants get a chance to explain their thoughts and feelings, which a
quantitative method lacks. Though, this method is really time-consuming and
therefore the number of participants may be a lot less than a quantitative
method.
2. What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
One thing I
really liked about this study was that the early interviews shaped the latter. All
interviews were conducted over a 5-month period, which gave the author a chance
to learn from his mistakes and develop better and more suitable questions. He
also used a software called Atlas.Ti which made it easier to identify pattern
and also develop a dense understandning. This was something I never had thought
about, using a software to analyze qualitative interviews!
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
One problem
I found was that he only used frequent users of Foursquare. If he had interviewed
users with more varying activity levels, there are easier to generalize. He
tried to interview users that didn’t use Foursquare regularly but the answers
weren’t that comprehensive, so he decided to only interview users that used
Foursquare on a regular basis. This may be bad, but it also may be good since
he argued that the data from non-frequent users couldn’t be used to develop a
dense understanding. Anyhow, I like that he adjusted the study along the way!
PART II
1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
A case study is a research method when the researcher tries to get deep knowledge of a single, or sometimes a few, phenomena. A case study is a carried out in the “real world”, empiricism. It is often a combination of both a qualitative and a quantitative method, but it can also be either one alone.2. 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 have chosen the paper “Problem solving by 5–6 years old kindergarten children in a computer programming environment: A case study” from the journal “Computers & Education” with an impact factor of 2,621. This paper is also quite self-explanatory; the aim of this study is to investigate kindergarten children’s problem solving skills and reactions to a programming environment.
To analyze this case study I use the different steps of “Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research” (Eisenhardt). The first steps in the process – getting started, selecting cases and crafting instruments and protocols – were being followed according to me. The authors defined a research question and specified the population. They also used multiply methods to gather data; both raw data, quantitative, from the tests and also qualitative data from the conversations among the peers and the teacher. The rest of the steps I think they followed somewhat, but I am not sure that I have interpreted the steps correctly. I miss the cross-case pattern in the analyze step, but they do the enfolding literature step really good by comparing to other similar studies.
I think I was a bit tricky to analyze the paper using this model, I’m looking forward to the seminar to get more understanding.
Hi Daniel! Good blog post! To conduct your interviews over time so you can develop your questions seemed really smart. I hadn't thought about that before so thanks for sharing that. But one thought I had when reading this is that may have the effect that you are only using the results from the later interviews. You may discard the results from the earlier interviews since you know that you asked the wrong questions, don't you think? And also that the results from the earlier and later interviews can be difficult to compare. This necessarily don't have to be a bad but I think you have to remember this when changing your interview structure.
SvaraRadera