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.