Theme 6 - Qualitative and case study research (1/2)

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

The qualitative method used in “Designing an Interactive Audio Interface for Climate Science” was interviews. Benefits of interviews are that they allow the possibility of getting a more detailed view of the landscape that is being researched and what the participant’s thoughts, feelings and experiences are which is not possible to the same extent with quantitative methods. Also, interviews (depending on the structural type) may have room for follow up questions and the participant can explain his or her thoughts. Limitations are however that data and results gathered from a small number of people can very rarely be generalized. Also, the volume of data collected is often very large and it is time and resource consuming to analyze the collected data.

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

Since I have already taken a few courses within the topic of theory and method and more specifically, qualitative and quantitative method, I did not feel that this paper specifically affected my knowledge of qualitative methods. We also discussed qualitative methods during the week with the theme quantitative methods so this theme is for me more of a repetition.

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

This is a difficult question to answer as the paper hardly provided any information about how the interviews were conducted. The study used interviews as a method but it did not say if these were structured, semi-structured or unstructured. It does not mention the number of participants either but quickly moves on to explaining the data analysis. The information provided about the interviews is that these were conducted in German while the paper was written in English. There is no motivation for this but my guess would be that it was more convenient to use the native language of the participants. This could have effect of the result of the study as the results of the interviews were translated which means that certain differences may have occurred due to cultural differences.

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

A case study is research that focuses on the development of a specific situation, organization, group or person over a certain amount of time. An example of this could be researching a specific school to see why they have e.g. a higher grade average than other schools in the area.

2.      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.

The following 8 steps are recommended by “Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research”. These serve as a roadmap for how case studies should be conducted. The paper I chose to analyze was “The Computer Integration of the Enterprise”.

Step 1) Getting started: define research question

I could not find a specific stated research question, only a problem area which means that this step was not fulfilled.

Step 2) Selecting cases

The paper described the enterprise chosen thoroughly, however the enterprise was described relatively late in the paper, i.e. not in the same order as recommended by “Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research”.

Step 3) Crafting instruments/protocols: data collection methods

The data collection methods used were surveys and interviews performed over two years. I felt the information provided about the data collection was sufficient to fulfill the demands for this step.

Step 4) Entering the field

This is done, especially when collecting data and defining the different definitions and specifications, analysis is done continuously through the paper as they explain and reason around the different definitions proposed.

Step 5) Analyzing data

I perceive that analysis is done in several steps and not only this one. The analysis has a clear correlation to the data collected.

Step 6) Shaping hypothesis

There was a hypothesis that was clearly stated in the paper. However, from the paper I couldn’t see if the process was iterative and looking into not only “what” but also “why” which is an important part of step 6.

Step 7) Enfolding literature

The paper includes other literature and compares other texts with its own definitions which is good, but the literature discussed only supports the paper. There is no literature that conflicts with the paper which is an important part of step 7.

 Step 8) Reaching closure

Yes, this is done to an extent that seems reasonable for the study.