Theme 6 (Post) - Qualitative and case study research

The sixth theme of the course was about “Qualitative and case study research” and this time we had to prepare by reading "Building Theories from Case Study Research” by Eisenhardt. In addition, we had to select a media technology research paper using qualitative methods, where I chose “Self-presentation and hiring recommendations in online communities: Lessons from LinkedIn” by Johannes Kuo-Huie Chiang and Hung-Yue Suen and a paper that is using the case study research method, where I chose “Structuring the discourse on social networks for learning: Case studies on blogs and microblogs” by Aline M. Marques, Rafael Krejci, Sean W.M. Siqueira, Mariano Pimentel and Maria Helena L.B. Braz. After already discussing quantitative methods I found it interesting to finally gather in-depth knowledge about qualitative methods and the case study research.

Unfortunately the lecture for theme six was cancelled on short-notice and hence we only had the seminar group left in order discuss our thoughts gathered after the readings. It would have been nice to listen to the expertise of the lecturer in order to combine the thoughts of the read and the heard. In the majority of the previous themes the lecture really helped to get new insights and a broader understanding of the theme.

As we already discussed qualitative methods quite a lot during the theme of quantitative methods to get the counter characteristics of them, Ilias Bergström encouraged us to focus on the case study research during our discussion. Due to the absence of the lecture this made also sense to me as I didn’t acquire any further insights about qualitative methods worthwhile discussing. During the seminar we presented our chosen articles to each other and used the table of "Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research" as evaluation guideline in order to determine if the respective case study research was done in a proper way and where the strengths and weaknesses were. It was very interesting to see how each of us found further strengths and weaknesses after discussing the research paper openly with the group.Case studies are furthmore cyclical and hence revolving around a specific context, i.e. case studies occuring in cycles. This means that a result of a case study research can cause another research with the result as a starting point. In my opinion the most important about case study research is that there are no clear guidelines when creating a case study. The purpose of a case study is to build a theory rather than test a theory, i.e. investigating an unknown field in order to find enough to build a theory, which can be tested on a later stage. Hence, case study research is a form of research where a hypothesis is actually not needed as a hypothesis can be a result of a case study. In my opinion the seminar group really helped to have a better understanding what a case study actually is and what isn't as this quite was hard to me to seperate a case study from the other research methods.