Theme 6 (Pre): Qualitative and case study research

Select a media technology research paper that is using qualitative methods. The paper should have been published in a high quality journal, with an “impact factor” of 1.0 or above. The following are examples of questions to discuss in your blog posting:

I have selected the article “Self-presentation and hiring recommendations in online communities: Lessons from LinkedIn” by Johannes Kuo-Huie Chiang and Hung-Yue Suen published in the journal “Computers in human behaviour”, which has an impact factor of 2.694.

Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

The paper uses the qualitative methods of qualitative interviews and focus groups.  More specifically, the pilot test of the research consists of five in-depth interviews with human resources professionals who have hiring experience with LinkedIn and two focus groups (one with the five HR professionals and one with five actual job seekers using LinkedIn).

Benefits of using such qualitative methods:

- The researcher can interact with the participants and can ask follow-up questions or ask questions.

- It is easier to draw conclusions from the results than from complicated statistical data.

- Due to body language or facial expression, information besides verbal responses can be recorded as well.

Limitations of using such qualitative methods:

- As the sample sizes are tremendously smaller it might be not such a good representation compared to quantitative methods.

- Analyzing and interpreting is much more time-consuming than analyzing and interpreting quantitative data.

- Personal bias can be an issue as the researcher may react to the subject’s responses, encouraging or discouraging the dialogue in a certain direction

What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?

Qualitative methods can bring you important insights what actually is relevant to research in a study. In this article for example the pilot test with its qualitative methods were used in order to exclude not relevant categories. That is why LinkedIn’s self-presentation categories of, for example, “updated activity on the personal page”, “connections’, ‘number of connections’, and “joined groups” were excluded as such information is either seldom noticed by recruiters or used for self-presentation by job seekers.

Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

Due to the diversity of job seekers a focus group of only five job seekers is in my opinion far too small to enable representative results. Even if the focus group were only used in the pilot test in order to find 14 relevant self-presentation categories of job seekers I don’t think that such a high number of relevant categories can be based on only five people. For a representative selection there is in my view definitely a higher number of job seekers needed to minimize the influence of outlier.

Select a media technology research paper that is using the case study research method. The paper should have been published in a high quality journal, with an “impact factor” of 1.0 or above. Your tasks are the following:

Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.

A case study is a research method which aims to provide detailed information of the investigated research topic. Most case studies combine different research methods and hence a case study can consist of qualitative, quantitative or both methods to gather deeper data in order to enable consecutive conclusions. Furthermore, a case study is often applied to test theories in an everyday environment.

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.

I have selected the article „ 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 published in the journal “Computers in human behaviour”, which has an impact factor of 2.694.

Strengths of the paper:

Crafting Instruments and Protocols:
The authors combined quantitative and qualitative in the research and hence created a synergetic view of evidence by using questionnaires, interviews and application logs in order to gather data.

Enfolding Literature:
The researchers include previous published articles and findings and also comparing with similar literature and hence raising the theoretical level and building internal validity.

Weakness of the paper:

Analyzing data:

According to Eisenhardt, within-case analysis is a key feature of analysis since as it gains familiarity with data and preliminary theory generation. After my opinion in this paper some appearing relevant information to me gets discarded as not relevant and hence it seems that the authors filtering the data in a way to have significant results in the end. It feels a bit as if the authors wanted to validate intended results by analysing the data in the right way.