POST Seminar 6: Qualitative and Case study research

Last weeks theme was about qualitative and case study research, which also was the last theme in the course. In the seminar we first discussed our texts in groups and then discussed questions about qualitative studies and case studies that we had. We talked about how qualitative studies can be poor if the questions are no good. We also talked a lot how we define case study, what a case is and what is not. We then talked about all the questions from all the groups together, and it seemed that many had similar questions. A good point that Leif made was that you can use different methods and get different results of the same questions. So you have to keep that aspect in mind that different point of views can tell different things, and might also conflict, though it must not necessary mean that it's not true. He gave an example of the theory of light; one says that light is particles and the other says it's waves, and both are considering true.

I think this parts about case study, qualitative and also quantitative studies was more hands on than the other themes, and easy to understand and evaluate. Maybe not as interesting as the more philosophical subjects, but more useful when we´re going to write our master thesis.

I will finish this post with thanking for the course. In this course i have absolutely developed my understanding for scientific research, identifying and critically examine, outline and analyze, and identifying methodological problems.

POST Theme 5: Design research

This week had no seminars, instead we listened on two lectures. The first one was with Eva-Lotta Sallnäs and she told us about her research in haptic interfaces and how it could improve social presence. She explained how they designed their research and about concepts ad critiques. It was interesting to not only read about, but actually have someone explained and show photos about how the research was implemented.

The other one was with Haibo Li. His lecture focused around five topics; how to come up with an idea, how to filter the idea, how to validate the idea, how to evaluate the idea and how to communicate the idea.
One thing he told us about when it comes to problem solving, is the importance of defining a problem. He told us a story about a student and the professor who is hunted by a bear and the student asked the following question: how to outrun a bear?. The fact is that there is no way for a human being to outrun a bear. But the problem in reality is that the student just want to outrun the bear so he would not be eaten. But if the bear catches the professor first, he will survive. So the question then become like this: How to outrun the professor?.
He talked about his own rule about defining and solving the problem, and called it 10+90. 10% of the time needs to be focused on defining the problem so the problem can be solved in the best way.
Then he continued with the importance of math when solving media technology problems, and using the usability definitions when evaluating a media technology ideas.  

PRE Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

Qualitative study

I chose to read Perceived connections between information and communication technology use and mental symptoms among young adults - a qualitative study. It's about people who got mentally ill by to much use of information and communication technologies but the casual mechanism is unclear. This study is a to find some possible explanations.

1. Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

They using semi-structured questions with open-ended questions about possible connections between the use of computers and mobile phones, and stress, depression, and sleep disturbances. 16 men and 16 woman was followed during one year. The interview data was analyzed with qualitative content analysis and is explained in a model.


2. What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?

That qualitative studies is good to get explanation of things due to that you research on an individual level really and ask questions specific to every person and evaluate their perception. You can dig deeper in topics that you find that can provide to your theory. But there is a need to design the questions really good so you the questions doesn't steer and coloring the answer.

3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

It is mentioned that this study only provide some factors for mental illness in connected with ICT and can explain the chosen group. The study needs to develop in a state-of-the-art study. It's also possible that the mental state of the subjects affected the participants perceipton Also there is a 50/50 split between males and females in this studio, though in reality the users of mobil phones are higher for women.

It's also mentioned that the participants answer in more generally terms than of personal experience which lead to the fact that some results can be based more on ideas and speculations.


Case study

1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is. 

A case study is a study to get really deep context about a phenomena in a certain field. Often are only one or a few cases studied and can include both quantitative and qualitative to investigate the given or chosen case. Case studies often provide description, test theory, or generate theory.

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.

For this part of the theme i red Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry. Many industries and companies uses social media like facebook and twitter etc for customer relations and provide services. This is a case study to analyze how three pizza companies uses social media.

Strengths:
They defined questions in the beginning. It provides better grounding of construct measures and focuses efforts.
Also uses a specific target group, not randomly. It sharpens external validity according to Eisenhardt.
Multiple data collecting methods, both quantitative methods and text mining. Also multiple investigators. It provides different perspectives.
A lot of enfolding literature; in almost every section they begin with discussions of other theories about the content.

Weaknesses: 
Doesn't search for so many "why" behind relationships, more focus on how it is and what they think they should do.

POST Seminar 4: Quantitative research

Theme 4 was about quantitative research and instead of having a seminar as usual, we had a workshop about quantitative research, in which we were playing a game. We divided the group to three different teams. Every team said so many things they could think about of a topic, and for every "unique" thing you came up with, you got i point. With "unique" a mean something that no other group said. It stimulated our creativity and we all came up with some very good aspects.

Enough about the game and more about what we discussed. Topics handled during the workshop was advantages and disadvantages with quantitative methods compared with qualitative. Some things we said was that with quantitative methods you get statistic data, you can do bigger surveys, easy to compare and follow up results, easy to visualize and to generalize. Things we said about qualitative where that you get more depth, good for explaining and investigating why etc. We then focused more about quantitative methods and surveys. The tricky thing in surveys is how to ask the questions and how important it is to test the questions. We got to see some examples of bad questioning. We also talked about how scale should look like, it's a good idea to have neutral options, because you sometimes don't want to take a standing. That's why grading scale surveys not should maintain even numbers of options. We played the game about pros and coins about paper vs web surveys. Paper is bad for the environment, more expensive, less effective to collect data for example. Web surveys is faster, cheaper and more environmental friendly (we discussed that if it really is so, and it depends of course), you can design it so everybody needs to answer all questions, interactive surveys, video/audio, easy to make international surveys (different languages) etc.. And some cons are for example technological problems, it can be hacked (safety) etc. We came up with a lot more...

We also get some golden rules how to gain responders. First the invitation, then send out the survey, and then reminders, reminders, reminders.

The workshop then ended with a cookie.

PRE Theme 5: Design research

1. How can media technologies be evaluated?

By using the usability evaluation. It is, according to ISO (International organization of standardization), defined as effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Effectiveness is how well the technology accomplishes the task, efficiency is how much effort it takes to use the technology and satisfaction relates to comfort and acceptability of the technology.

2. What role will prototypes play in research?

The prototype can be the link between theory and method in one way. From theory you create a prototype, and from the prototype you know witch method is necessary to do your research and evaluate the technology.


3. Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?

To demonstrate it’s feasibility and to actually have a prototype to use within your research. For example, in the paper about rendering a football game with mobile vibration, it was necessary to do a realization of the concept to do studies and evaluations.


4. What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?
How can design research be communicated/presented?
A prototype is a “realization” of the concept of the idé or product, but doesn’t necessary have to be a finished product. It is to demonstrate and do testing of the product and the ideas. There are practical limitations of a prototype. Building the full design is often expensive and time-consuming. Therefore it can be pragmatic to match the intended final performance of the product.

• How does a collaborative setting differ from a single user setting as regards methodology used and the results obtained?

In collaborative settings the research object isn’t a single person. Instead the research object is consists of two or more people. The results depend of two individuals or more. You have to make sure that the pairs or groups themselves are representative. But as the research objects consists of two or more people you can get different points of views from the same study by collect data from each person individually. An example is in the study A haptic tool for group work about geometrical concepts engaging blind and sighted pupils where there is a group of blindfolded and sighted people collaboratively performing a task.

• How can qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study complement each other?

With quantitative methods you get data that is easy to compare and evaluate. With qualitative data you get more depth and understanding is good to analyze why and how. With a method that includes both, for example semi-structured questions, you get answers that are easy to compare, but you can also ask more questions and follow-ups to investigate why they respond as they do on specific topics.

• ·How can using both subjective and objective methods give a better understanding of a phenomenon?

An objective method typically defies interpretation. But sometimes there are things that are difficult to measure. To get a better understanding you need both. For example, subjective methods can be used to identify specific results of the research that differs markedly from the others.

POST Seminar 3: Research and Theory

Last weeks theme was about theory and what it is. We had a lecture which gave me more insight of the concept theory. During our seminar we discussed our texts which we have been reading and what theories they conclude. Then we discussed theory from a more philosophic point of view. This is what I really enjoyed of the seminar. We discussed what a theory can be, examples like if we observe that if we drop a ball and it falls to the ground, and then we then say that balls falls to the ground when you drop it, is this a theory then? We talked about different concepts of theory and grounded theory, and the main differences between scientific theories and the actual meaning of the word theory. We ended up asking the question; What is not theory?

I learned a lot about what theory is during that week and I learned, what maybe is most important and what might will be most useful, is that I now know can determine what's theory and distinguish theory from hypothesis and methods. I also learned that there often is deeper and more underlaying theories when you read texts. 

PRE Theme 4: Quantitative research

For this theme I chose the paper Public Displays of Play: Studying Online Games in Physical Settings, written by Nicholas Taylor, Jennifer Jenson, Suzanne de Castell and Barry Dilouya for Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication Volume 19, Issue 4. It is a study to show the relations between players and contexts of play, if participants of public events participate in virtual worlds.


1. Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

This is a large-scale study of virtual worlds where they found their participants in public gaming events. There are a total of 382 participants in the study in four different environments; LAN events in England, LAN events in Vancouver and Toronto, Internet cafés in Vancouver and Toronto and Fan culture events in Vancouver and Toronto. All are asked the same question: “Do you participate in virtual worlds?”. They categorized people by sex, age, SES, race, and level of education. The study also provides stories from some users.


2. What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?

I learned that you easily can get statistics of things, in this case what type of user which participate in virtual worlds, and get relations between questions. But I also learned that you could never know why or how those relations exist. The stories, though, provide more insight from a few people.


3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?

The main methodological problems of this study from the point I see it, is what I was writing about above. The study never answers why the results are the way they are. The questions could be more semi-structured to get a bigger scope to understand the survey.




1. Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?


With quantitative methods you get the data you need to support your claims, prove hypothesis and show relations. But that’s it, you never gain depth in your knowledge.


2. Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

Qualitative methods provides more depth and you can explain relations etc from a deeper point of view, but it demands good analyses.

POST Seminar 2: Critical media studies

In the lecture we were taught that to really understand a text, the context must be the same when you read it as when it was written. If the text was written in a cafe, you have to be in a cafe when you read it. The lecture contained history of what was happening during the time the texts were written, which made it easier to put my self into the context.
The texts were Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment and Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity. Benjamin wrote his text before the world war II, and the other text was written during the war. These texts were very difficult in another way. Though Kant was very abstract, these text's where very back and forward, so it was it was hard to keep up with the reasoning.

During the seminar we discussed dialectics, nominalism, the enlightenment and how relate to mass culture during the time these texts were written. If mass culture can have revolutionary potentials. We talked about how fascism made politics aesthetic and how communism made aesthetics political.   One really good thing that the teacher did was the drawing of a cave to better understand the concept of nominalism. There was this man in the middle, the shadow of the real world on the wall of the cave which we only can see, and then the "idea"-world outside. And we discussed how important it can be to step away and look out from the cave into the "idea"-world, which also is one of the main critique of nominalism. Sometimes in can be good to use the "idea"-world, because society in itself is just a idea.

PRE Theme 3: Research and theory

I chose Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication for the third seminar. It is an Internet based journal about social science research on communicating with computer-based media technologies. It’s interdisciplinary and publishes work from communication, business, education, political science, sociology, psychology, media studies, information science, and other disciplines.

The paper I read was Channeling Science Information Seekers' Attention? A Content Analysis of Top-Ranked vs. Lower-Ranked Sites in Google from the same journal written by Nan Li, Ashley A. Anderson, Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele. It says that search engines on the web make larger and more popular websites more appearance and dominant while they discriminate smaller websites, according to researchers. But there is a lack of empirical studies if search engines may favor a certain type of websites. The main questions of this paper are how do the very top results that receive vast public attention portray certain issues? This paper provides a research about how the content in top-ranked websites about nanotechnology differ from websites of lower ranking on Google. The method used was to take samples of the 32 first links, and by a program that’s collect data of the textual contents and by the content of the “child links”, the hyperlinks that are attached to them. The result shows that the top-ranked websites was more about technical function, environmental- and risk related information about nanotechnology. On lower-ranked sites they found that they contained significantly different themes. That shows that Google, as the market leading search engine, has an impact on web based science information.

1. A theory explains why, how and under which circumstances acts, events, structure, and thoughts occur of a certain phenomena. To identify objects of the phenomena and their relations to describe, explain, and enhance understanding of the world. Theory, though, is not references, is not data, is not a list of variables or constructs, is not diagrams and not hypothesis. These are just tools to support a theory.

2. This is a paper consisting a hypothesis, which says that content in the top-ranked websites on Google differ from low ranked websites. This is tested with a case study, to show these results. Therefore I think this is a typical prediction with testable proposition, but no causal explanation.

3. The limits of a prediction theory is the design of the task, and might not meet the expectations of the real world. The data can be wrong, or not enough significantly. The prediction is nor focused on explanation and doesn’t explains why it is like the theory says.

POST Seminar 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science

To prepare for the first seminar I red two text; the preface to the second edition of Critique of pure reason by Kant and Theaetetus by Plato and thought about the questions addressed to the seminar. What I first realized that these text was very philosophic and I discussed the texts with a friend who has studied idea history. Then on the seminar we first started to rehearse the texts and discussed the meaning. I am going to write about the main question we discussed.

•        How can we understand the world if can’t experience the real world, just the world we perceive?

We discussed that everyone creating an experience of the world in our mind. But how can we know this is true? The world as we know it meet certain criteria as time, space etc. The things we can perceive. But if there is more? What is the relation to colors for blind people? This is an interesting question, because for people who never has experienced colors can’t imagine them. There might be more things that we can’t experience. We also discussed how infants experiences the world? We said that things has a specific meaning. That’s why we experience them. And time and memory is important to perceive the meaning. And the knowledge you get from just agreeing. Metaphysics and critics are discuss what’s are truth about the world. But only to discuss you have to do certain agreements. No matter if your pro or against, if you’re going to discuss if a bock is blue or black, you first need to agree that there is a book and that it can have certain colors. This relates to a prior and also  where empiricism enters the discussion. As I feel that is more clear to me what both Kant and Plato meant after this seminar. But it also made me confused in from a bigger point of view.

PRE Theme 2: Critical media studies

1. Dialectic of Enlightenment

a. What is "Enlightenment"?

Enlightenment is concept to spread knowledge built on rationalism, logic and autonomy about nature and in order to get rid the history of myths about the world.

b. What is "dialectic"?

It is about discussing what is truth by rational discussions. People have to clarify what is not truth and comparing and listen to each others knowledge and opinion.

c. What is "nominalism" and why is it an important concept in the text?

It’s about that general concepts isn’t anything except of the individual object. Objects don’t exist only because it has a general thing named by it.

d. What is the meaning and function of "myth" in Adorno and Horkheimer's argument?

Myths are the explanation of things to fill the gap of knowledge. Myths are more based on feign and stories than by rationalism and logic.

2. "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity"

a. In the beginning of the essay, Benjamin talks about the relation between "superstructure" and "substructure" in the capitalist order of production. What do the concepts "superstructure" and "substructure" mean in this context and what is the point of analyzing cultural production from a Marxist perspective?

Substructure can relies to what the production is constructed of and superstructure is what the substructure build. Like a painting consist of paint, paper and so on, but the superstructure is the art.

b. Does culture have revolutionary potentials (according to Benjamin)? If so, describe these potentials. Does Benjamin's perspective differ from the perspective of Adorno & Horkheimer in this regard?

Yes, because it is easy to spread and it can contains messages that is easy to adept, and in this way is a kind of enlightenment.

c. Benjamin discusses how people perceive the world through the senses and argues that this perception can be both naturally and historically determined. What does this mean? Give some examples of historically determined perception (from Benjamin's essay and/or other contexts).

Naturally perceive is how we naturally perceive things around us. But we can change our way to perceive things by historical and cultural changes. Benjamin mentions, for example, the way of how people changed their way of looking at art in the fifth century by Romans.

d. What does Benjamin mean by the term "aura"? Are there different kinds of aura in natural objects compared to art objects?

The aura is the authenticity of an artwork, like in a painting, that not can be reproduced, like a copy of a photo.

PRE Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science

In this post I am going to reflect about two questions that are addressed to two texts, Plato’s Theaetetus and Kant’s second preface to Critique of Pure Reason.

1. In the preface to the second edition of "Critique of Pure Reason" (page B xvi) Kant says: "Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition." How are we to understand this?

I think he meant that we know the world in the way we experience it and how we are used to experience it. Like if we are standing on the earth and looking at the sun you see that the sun rotates around the earth. But from another perspective you see that it is, in fact, the earth rotating around the sun. Therefore he means that we can learn more about knowledge if we assume that objects must conform to cognition, instead of cognition must conform to objects as we perceive.

2. At the end of the discussion of the definition "Knowledge is perception", Socrates argues that we do not see and hear "with" the eyes and the ears, but "through" the eyes and the ears. How are we to understand this? And in what way is it correct to say that Soctrates argument is directed towards what we in modern terms call "empiricism"?

I understood it so that he meant we see thing around us and hear things around us, but it is in our brains and in our minds we create the perception of what is around us, how things interrelate and so on. And it is how we perceive we know things, basically. Empiricism is about that as well. It is based on the idea that only that is proven by experience can be count as reliable. .