1. Which qualitative
method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations
of using these methods?
2. What did you learn
about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
3. Which are the main
methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative
method or methods have been improved?
I read a paper called Teenage Room Culture: Where Media and Identities Intersect by Brown
et al. that were published in the journal Communication Research that has an
impact factor of 2.439.
In this paper the authors wanted to find out why
teenagers, or adolescents, design their room a certain way and how it could
relate to mass media. The study was held during 5 years. Their participants
were both male and female adolescents. At first they held structured interviews
with each participants. These were based on a specific set of questions that were
asked to each participant. A majority of the interviews were held in the
participants’ rooms.
In this study their interviews aimed to give insight of for what reasons the adolescents had different items in their room. Apart from the interviews they gave the participants a tape recorder and asked them to give them a room tour and describe their room and the items in it. This was a method that was called “autodriving”, meaning that the participants was not answering questions from the interviewee yet instead analysed their own surrounding aloud. They also had a method where the participants were asked to interview each other.
An example of a limitation for the method of structured interviews is that it leaves less room to continue a discussion with follow-up questions which would be the case of a semi-structured interview. A benefit would be that it keeps the data focused in terms of having a structure that leads to discussions concerning for example the research question.
I think that one of the things that I have learnt from the paper are, too me, new methods to collect qualitative data. I had heard of structured and semi-structured interviews before. However the method of autodriving was new to me.
An example of an implication during the study was
participants’ confusion on different questions. Two examples were the question
on the participants own role in different relationships and the question on what
identity they considered themselves to have as a physical being. These I think
are examples of different perceptions of the words being stated. The
interviewee’s who together had designed the questions had experience of the information
and questions that were underlying to these interview questions. The
participants on the other hand did not share the same experiences and therefore
did not know what to answer. I think that one potential solution would have
been to have tested the questions beforehand. It is stated in the paper that
they tried to phrase the question differently without any progress being made.
However this seems to have occurred during the study and not beforehand.
1. Briefly explain to
a first year university student what a case study is.
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.
A case study is when a study is made with more
specific settings, or cases, in mind. Case study can mean to study for example
a specific company which would mean that it focuses on one case. Or a case
study can involve several settings, it can for example include several
companies to continue earlier example. That would mean that it focuses on
several cases. In order to collect data for a case study they can rely on both
quantitative methods and qualitative methods. Meaning that they can use both
numerical data that they collect with the help of for example questionnaires
and data in the form of answers from participants from interviews. Case studies
can also rely on one of the two methods alone.
I read a paper called Cross-cultural Comparisons of Online Collaboration that was
published in the journal of Computer-Mediated Communication with an impact
factor of 3.117. This was a case study about if different cultures would impact
how the people interact in an online collaborative setting. I found it
difficult to find weaknesses when I tried to analyse it with the different
steps from the table in mind. The beginning and selecting of cases were
discussed early in the paper and was explained by using earlier studies as
examples as to why these were relevant. I think that they followed the steps of
Crafting Instruments and Protocols, Entering the Field and Analyzing Data. They
used three different methods and used both qualitative and quantitative research methods. One aspect that I think can be argued as a weakness is that one
of the methods meant to code transcriptions into different categories of
intentions without having the participants explain what the intention of their
own statement was. As for the last three steps I think that a potential
weakness would be that the study mostly presents literature that do not conflict
the study. However this might be due to no earlier conflicting study.
References:
Brown, J. et al. (1994). Teenage Room Culture : Where Media and Identities Intersect
Kyong-Jee, K. et al. (2002). Cross-cultural
Comparisons of Online Collaboration
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