Post theme 6 reflection

This week I felt I had a better understanding of qualitative methods compared to the case study prior to the seminar. Since we had discussed quantitative methods in one of the previous weeks, we also compared it to qualitative methods, so this concept was not so new to me.

During the seminar a lot of my questions where answered about the case study research method. For example, do you have to combine both qualitative and quantitative methods when conducting a case study research? My initial answer would have been yes, but now I know it doesn't have to be that way. I also felt I got a better grasp on the actual steps when doing a case study, and also that the ideal number of cases is 4-10 (and the reason why it has to be 4 and not 3, was also kind of funny).

To summarize, I felt I got an overall better grasp of what a case study actually is, and what strengths and weaknesses it has.

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

Qualitative methods
The paper I read was  Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube by Lange, P. G. (2007). The reasearch analyses how different user behaviors reflects on social relationships among youth. It also reserches the "publicly private" and "privately public" behaviors.

The methods used included semi-structured interviews, fieldnotes on obsevations, analyses of videos and comments and examination of subscriptions and friendships. The interviews where conducted in different ways, ranging from face-to-face to instant messanging. This can of course give different outcomes because of the way the interviews was done (it's possible to think that it's easier to answer some questions when you don't see the face of the interviewer). The wide range of different methods used gives the researchers a lot of data to work with, wich can be both a good and a bad thing. There's no risk that you run out of data but on the other hand it can be hard to structure the resarch and obtain useful results.

Compared to when using a quantitative method, the questions asked where very open ended and promoted for discussion. The questions asked was also adapted depending on who they interviewed, which is also different from a quantitative method. This can also be argued wether it's a good or bad thing to adapt the questions between interviewees. It can make it harder to compare the results, which is already hard beacuse it is a qualitative study. But it can also make the interviews be more relevant, and you avoid spending time on irrelevant questions.

Case study
A case study is a case-oriented method, that is, it focuses on one or more cases (or scenarios) that is either found out in the field, or constructed by the researcher. When the case is decided or found, the research is conducted by gathering data through different ways or methods, for example, you can both combine qualitative and quantitative methods when doing a case study.

I chose the paper Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry (2013). The study is trying to research an area that hasn't got so much attention, and no similar study has been conducted for this kind of case. Therefore, the study aims to explain a kind of untouched field. Which is both exciting but at the same time challenging.

In the study first quantitative data was manually collected through social media sites, then text-mining was applied to the companies Facebook and Twitter sites. The text mining was conducted in October, which apparently is the busiest month for the pizza industry. This means more data is gained, but the result may be biased compared to doing it in an "average" month. The methods used in the study gives the researchers a lot of data to work with, but with the disadvantage that it can be hard to efficiently analyze the results.

Post theme 5 reflection

This week we did not have a seminar but instead to different lectures on design research. Both lectures where intersting but quite different from each other!

The thing that stood out to me most was the importance of thinking about the actual problem you want to solve with your research. Finding a problem is not hard, but finding the right problem to solve is the tricky part. Actually finding the problem is probably a step we should spend more time on, beacuse if we solve the "wrong" problem, the resarch could become useless or at least overly complicated (I liked Haibo's example with the student and the bear, although a little cruel).

I also learned about the improtance of math when evaluating an idea. Even though it can seem hard at first to reduce something to just numbers, it can be possible and makes it much more easy to evaluate and compare it to your other ideas (especially when you have a lot of them).

The biggest thing I will remember from this theme is to consider both your problem and your ideas more methodologically and carefully, before you jump into trying to solve it!

Theme 5: Design Research

Reflections on "Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration"

When doing any kind of research or design research the most importan step is to consider "who is the target" and  "who am I designing it for"? This goes hand in hand with realizing the limitations and possibilites of the human body. In this paper, for example, when designing how the vibration system shall work we have to consider the dynamics of the human touch sense (it can not be too detailed, but it can not be too many vibrations either, since it will be annoying or painful for the user.) 

Further, to evaluate the system, using a set standard can be useful to both evaluate and compare it to other systems. For example in this study, using defined terms such as Effectiveness, Efficiency and Satisfaction. Using a well defines systems for evaluation makes it possible to asign numbers and calculate/measure how good the idea is.

The prototype of course plays a very important part in the research. If the resarch is built around a prototype then in one way it becomes the whole resarch. For example, if the prototype is built in a bad way, the research can become useless (at least for the specific questions you are trying to answer). 

Reflections on Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander's papers

A collaborative setting and a single user setting differs in a lot of aspects and provides their own difficulties and opportunities. In a collaborative setting more social aspects has to be considered, for example, how do the users react in this social setting, how do thery react to each other and how does it affect the research. People behave differently when alone or in a group, and that factor has to be considered when doing and designing the resarch (and that's not an easy task of course!).

Interestingly both quantitative and qualitative methods can be derived from one another, depending on how the resarch is conducted. If doing interviews (a qualitative method) the transcripts from the interviews can later be analyzed in  a quantitative way, for example by counting how many times a certain word was used.

Post theme 4 reflection

This week's seminar was a lot of fun, Olle held a presentation and we had group discussions as well. We discussed a lot about the differences between qualitative and quantitative methods, and their respective strong and weak points. We did some group exercises where we had to brain storm both the positive and negative aspects of the different methods. This made us try to come up with as many points as we could, some very far fetched but it made us think of outside the box (you could say it was more focus on quantity than quality from our side).

This was actually talked about on the lecture in the week after, but it was interesting considering that you can actually for get quantitative information from a qualitative study, and vice versa. I hadn't thought about it before, but it made me reconsider the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods. They are separate things but can be derived from each other depending on the study conducted.

Post theme 3 reflection

The most interesting part about the seminar was discussing what theory really is. We had some different views in our group, and that was what made the discussion interesting. My belief was that theory is constructed and always needed when doing some kind of research. It's very hard to have an unbiased opinion, and theory is kind of biased in itself. The hard questions is - is it possible to do research without having any theoretical grounding? My answer would be no - but maybe that depends on how you define theory.

I really think theory is something that is easily overlooked and taken for granted when doing and reading a lot of research. Personally, I haven't thought much about it before, but this seminar made me think about it and reflect in what ways theory can influence both the research and the results. It's a more powerful tool than you might think first - but you really should choose the theoretical grounding with caution.

Theme 4: Quantitative methods

In the paper I read, Deviant Behavior in Computer-Mediated Communication: Development and Validation of a Measure of Cybersexual Harassment by Ritter, B. A. (2013) the quantitative method used is comprised by item generation, scale development & scale evaluation. The benefits are that a lot of questions can be generated and easily evaluated and used on a lot of people. The scale generated can be used to compare data easier. But a lot of detail is lost when using a quantitative method, since everything is reduced to numbers. There where a lot of steps to generate the items and later the scale, more than I thought.

Quantitative methods

When doing a quantitative research the method has to be very streamlined and there’s little space for answering the questions asked in a nuanced way. There´s also a risk that each participant interprets the questions in their own way, and their answer differs more or less than they should.

On the positive side, you could say that if there are enough participants these interpretations will be less likely to have an effect. Say half of the participants over exaggerate, and the other half understates their answers, then the those answers will cancel out each other, and the result will show a more balanced picture.

Qualitative methods

With a qualitative study you can get a more nuanced result, but it may be harder to decipher. The answers you get from the participants may be more truer (at least to them), but are harder to compare to the other participants. Also, since you don’t have as many participants, you may not get enough data for your research.

At the end of the day, there’s no answer to what method is best over all, but different methods can be better for particular studies, and the hard part is to decide what kind of method you should use for your research.