fredag 10 oktober 2014

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research


Part 1
The paper I’ve read is called “Facebook and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Unintended Consequences” and investigates Facebook users’ awareness of privacy issues and precieved benefits and risks of utilizing facebook.
Research found that Facebook is deeply integrated in users’ daily lives through specific routines and rituals. Users claimed to understand privacy issues, yet reported uploading large amounts of personal information. Risks to privacy invasion were ascribed more to others than to the self. However, users reporting privacy invasion were more likely to change privacy settings than those merely hearing about other’s privacy invations. The results suggest that this attitude may be based on a combination of high gratification and usage patterns and safer use of social networks would require changes in user attitude.[1]

Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
Based on existing litterature and theories the authors define four research questions:

·      RQ1: How important is Facebook to its users and which role does it play in their social life?
·      RQ2: To what extent is Facebook part of everyday rituals or has created its own rituals?
·      RQ3: Which role does Facebook play in creating and promoting gossip and rumors?
·      RQ4: Which negative effects, particularly with respect to privacy intrusions, does Facebook have?

These questions guided in-depth face-to-face interviews with eight participants (two male, fix female) which were selected from an earlier survey on the subject. The reviews were recorded, transcribed and analyzed through a combination of qualitative content analysis.
The benefits of using interviews are that it results in how individuals think and feel about the chosen topic and why they hold certain opinions. It’s especially important if the research questions, as in this case, are more open and search for answers containing not only “if’s” but also “why’s”.

The limitations of interviews might be that it is very time consuming: finding interview objects, setting up, interviewing, transcribing, analyzing etc.

What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
That analyzing the interviews seams to take a lot of time and require a lot of different analyzing methods if you want to do it properly. For instance some of the methods named in the paper are: Typological reduction analysis and hermenenutical/thetorical interpretation. 

Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
An issue with this study seams to be that the interview participants were chosen largely based on how they had answered the previous surveys. This might result in a bias selection of participants where the selection is based in the authors hypotheses on the subject, which I consider somewhat problematic if you want to describe a generalised picture on the research area.


Part II

Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
A case study as a research method concerns a specific instance or manifestation of the phenomenon to be studied. A case study may be based on one case (single case study), or on several cases (multiple case study). A case may involve one actor, such as a person or an orginasation or it may involve several actors (such as studying a conversation between people or a traffic accident)[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 paper I’ve read is calledSocial media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry” and examines how social media competative analysis can be done through text mining to analyze unstructed text content on Facebook and Twitter for three large pizza chains. Results give recommendations in order to help companies develop their social media competative analysis strategy.

Strengths
 I think that a big strength of this paper is that they combine both quantitative and qualitative research methods which results in a more synergistic view of evidence, strengthens their grounding and gives different perspective on their research[3]. Furthermore, different tools for data analysis were used which had their own advantages and the three cases were treated as stand-alone cases which allowed the authors to look of patterns within each unique case before drawing any general conclusions.

Weaknesses
 I think that the data analysis in this research had it strengths it also has it’s weaknesses. Even though this research focuses on different types of data mining their result might would have been more interesting if they would have used some other methods in their research. Using only data mining is somewhat limiting when trying to understand how business should work towards social media. By looking beyond the comments and trying to understand how consumer behavior is changing by doing for example interviews with customers and businesses might would have resulted in deeper insights.



Referenser 

3.    http://www.jstor.org.focus.lib.kth.se/stable/258557
 

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