(I am
writing this post almost a week late, because I have been really sick in both
tonsillitis (halsfluss) and otitis (öroninflammation) so I have not been able
to write or even think due to the pain. But no I am eating penicillin and am
getting better everyday! Now back to school and life!)
The theme of the week was Qualitative and case study research. To
prepare for that I have read 2 papers that I have chosen becaused they seemed
relevant and I have also read an article about building theories from case
study research.
The first paper I chose to read was “Mobile
Geotagging: Reexamining Our Interactions with Urban Space” by Lee Humphreys and
Tony Liao. It was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
in April 2011.
The researchers examine Socialight and how
it could be used in everyday life. Socialight is a mobile geotagging service was
one of the first commercially available services for this kind of
location-based messages. It lets users leave “sticky notes” with messages to
themselves or others tagged with a specific geographical place, so when they
pass the place they get a notification of the sticky note in their mobile
phone.
The research was done by in-depth
interviews with 10 active Socialight users and also by participant observations.
Both authors joined Socialight as members and used the service. The in-depth
interviews were face-to-face if possible and otherwise they were conducted over
the phone. They lasted for about 30-60 minutes and they authors asked the
participants questions about their use of Socialight, how, why and when they
uses it. The authors contacted active Socialight users to find appropriate
participants for them to interview. They contacted 85 users in Socialight who
met the criteria for posting information the researchers had set up and got 16
answers, which resulted in 10 participants that got interviewed.
I think that their choice of method was
appropriate and relevant based on what they wanted to examine. One negative
thing is, as the authors also pointed out, was that it was going on for such a
long time (2 years) so the nature of Socialight changed during this period. At
first the service was designed for private use only but was developed to a
social media platform for developers to create their own location-based
services.
Since I also experiences from doing
in-depth interviews, my partner and me conducted 6 interviews of this type as a
part of our research in our bachelor thesis this spring, I am familiar with
this method. One of the benefits with
this type of research method is that it is adaptable due to the situation and
time, which probably was good in this case since the service Socialight was
changing during the period for research.
A limitation is that due to the small
number of participants the results cannot be generalized. It was also a shame
that only two out of ten participants were women. I question if the balance
really reflects upon the reality among the Socialight users, since it is not a
technical advanced system, at least it was not from the beginning.
I have also read a paper that uses a case
study as a research method. A case study is a research method focusing on
understanding the dynamics present within single settings. It is an in-depth study
of a single case or multiple cases, such as person, group or event.
The paper I have read is “Cross-Pollination of Information in Online
Social Media: A Case Study on Popular Social Networks” by Paridhi Jain,
Tiago Rodriguesy, Gabriel Magnoy, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and Virg´ılio Almeiday.
They have examined how information (video, photo and location) from three
online social media is shared and used on Twitter.
I have tried to analyse this case study
with help of the figure in the text “Building
Theories from Case Study Research”. The examined area are very specified
and concrete, also new and there is no previous research in this area of
cross-pollination. They have used a Twitter Streaming Application program
interface to collect the tweets, which was developed by a Brazilian Research
Institute. Then the tweets was filtered and sorted. Their data collection was
focusing on FIFA Word Cup in 2010, by using related keyword. Moving forward the collected data was turned
in to data sets and analysed with different tools and visualised. The results
were interesting, but as the authors reflect upon there are some limitations
due to the few keywords that the tweets were filtered by and therefore are generalizations
and hypothesis hard to formulate.
I think that the case study is well
performed and relevant. But since I not have much knowledge about case studies
in general, a part from what I just read, it is difficult to analyse it.
References
“Mobile
Geotagging: Reexamining Our Interactions with Urban Space”. Lee Humphreys, Tony Liao. Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication. April 2011.
“Building
Theories from Case Study Research”. Academy of
Management Review,
14(4), 532-550.
“Cross-Pollination
of Information in Online Social Media: A Case Study on Popular Social Networks”. Paridhi Jain, Tiago Rodriguesy, Gabriel Magnoy, Ponnurangam
Kumaraguru, Virg´ılio Almeiday. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.
2011.
As you say having just a few participants is obviously a limitation.
SvaraRaderaIn my opinion I think that when the number of participants is under 12-15 it would be better to focus on each on them with continuative methodologies such as diary edition and narratives or use them as single case studies to compare in order to build a model.