Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research - part 2

For this theme I read three papers and attended the seminar. I think that the seminar gave me a deeper understanding of how case studies and qualitative research methods works.

At the seminar we first summarized the papers we had read on qualitative research methods in smaller groups. I found it interesting to hear new perspectives on how to use this method. In the paper I read, interviews were held in a room between interviewee and the participants. Another example that was given during the seminar was that interviews can be held via video chat. However a limitation with communicating via video chat that was discussed was the potential lack of body language that might not be visible depending on what the interviewee and participant can see via the video chat. Another method that I found interesting was to first hold an interview and thereafter ask for the participants to read the transcriptions from their own interview. The participants may then comment on if there are anything they want to clarify or elaborate.

We then moved on to have discussions on the papers that concerned case studies.

From these paper we held a discussion on what methods in our papers had been used. A question that was asked for this was if case study meant the same thing as method. After discussing it, the conclusion was that it is not. However methods are used in a case study.

After our discussion in smaller groups, a discussion as a whole group was held. At first we discussed the benefits and limitations of semi-structured interviews. It was said that it was beneficial to be able to ask follow-up questions as an interviewee as this could lead to useful data that otherwise would not have been mentioned. 

The limitation concerned summarizing the data. This was seen as a limitations in that the questions asked for each participant was dependent on the individual interviews, meaning that it might be more difficult to find correlations or similarities between the answers.

Another method that was discussed in terms of its limitations was to have a focus group in a study. This was said to mean to interview a group of participants instead of interviewing each participant on their own. The limitation that was discussed were that the participants might interrupt each other and fill in on others sentences which can have a negative effect in terms of preventing participants from being able to fully elaborate their own thoughts.

We also discussed case studies. These were mentioned to be beneficial since they do not need to have “a recipe” or a set goal. Instead observations can be made that are analysed later on. “Anything goes” was a quote that was mentioned that was said to be a way of describing the benefits of a case study,

To end this blog post:

During the discussion as a whole group two terms were mentioned and explained. The term “participatory ethnography” and the term “ad hoc”. “Participatory ethnography” I interpreted to mean to engage with the participant and try to live like they do when making a study on humans. “Ad hoc” was mentioned in a discussion on slowly changing from an old theory to a new theory. I interpreted it to refer to when a new theory is able to make flaws in an old theory more transparent and small adjustments are made to the old theory in order to prevent it from being seen as false.