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.