Pre reflection - Theme 6: Qualitative methods and case studies

Qualitative methods

The first tasks was to find a paper in media technology that used qualitative methods. In qualitative methods the data is often more richer and goes deeper into the subject being studied. Examples of qualitative methods is interviews, focus groups and observations.

I choosed “Will the Revolution be Tweeted or Facebooked? Using Digital Communication Tools in Immigrant Activism”. Which is about how you can use digital communication tools in immigrant activism, just like the title says. Focus groups is the main method in this paper. They performed two focus groups that both consisted of five people that were all active in immigrant issues. During the focus group they asked open ended questions for the participants to discuss around. The benefit of a focus group is that the participants can be inspired by each other and that the discussion might result in more profound ideas and thoughts. Instead of having one big group they decided to have two small so they would be able to compare the discussions to see if they could find any similar structures and thoughts. A limitation with a focus group is that it could keep back some persons from saying what they want.

A few days after the focus group all the participants answered some open ended questions by email. The benefit with this is that they could pick up things that had come up after the focus groups and also catch some personal thoughts that didn’t come up during the focus group. That this is a good method to get as much from the study as possible. One methodological problem with the study is that they had 10 participants divided on only two groups. They mention this in the paper and just like I also should recommend is that the study could get more trusted and profound if they had more focus groups. I don’t think that bigger groups would have made it any better. I have to say that I think that even two small groups can be a good source of information especially if the participants is well versed in the subject, which is something I have learned for reading the paper.

Case studies

A case study is an detailed examination of a subject that is the “case”. The “case” being studied could be an individual, an organization or event. You study one or a few cases where you go in-depth and try to examine everything about it. Case studies involve different methods for data collection, like interviews, observations or surveys. The data that’s collected can be both qualitative and quantitative.

I choose to analyze the paper “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball” By Lee Humphreys. Dodgeball was a mobile social network service (MSNS) that enabled users to connect with other friends using using checkins telling where they are. They checked in by sending a text message to Dodgeball with their current location. Dodgeball in their turn sent an sms with location to their network of friends. Dodgeball existed between 2003 and 2009 and this study was made between 2005 and 2006.

Humphreys did a year-long qualitative field study about Dodgeball. He’s starts with two research questions:

1. What is the nature of interactions that develop around a MSNS (i.e., who is using it, and what are they using it for)?
2. How might these interactions change the way users think about and experience urban public spaces?

At this stage he doesn’t create any theory or hypothesis just like the case study research framework presented in "Building Theories form Case Study Resarch" by Eisenhardt. Humphrey chooses Dodgeball because of it being one of the most hyped and the first commercially available MSNS systems in the U.S. The study consisted of in-depth interviews with users and with the founder of Dodgeball. Besides that he also analyzed messages sent in a group of Dodgeball users during a week long period. He chose to only interview people that were frequent users of Dodgeball since he was interested in how people used the system and incorporated it into their lives. This means that he uses a theoretical sampling instead of a random just like the case study framework says you should do. Then it’s hard to tell how he does the analyze of data and the shaping of a hypothesis. Since he just present a his findings and not really present how when he shaped the hypothesis and if he is using an iterative process like the case study framework. He doesn't mention saturation of knowledge and I think that he only had a year on him to do this study and that he could have gone deeper into the subject if he had more time.

• Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building Theories from Case Study Research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532-550.
• Harlow, Summer; Guo, Lei (2014). Will the Revolution be Tweeted or Facebooked? Using Digital Communication Tools in Immigrant Activism. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 19(3), 463-478.
• Humphreys, Lee (2007). Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 13(1), 341-360.