Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research - reflection

The theme for this week was qualitative and case studies and to prepare for this I looked through my favorite journal, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and found initially one paper that was using qualitative methods, which I then discovered to be a case study as well, so I looked further for another one using a qualitative method. According to Eisenhardt (1989), which was also part of the preparation, a case study can make use of both qualitative and quantitative methods. When I have read the other blog posts this week I, and others, have come to reflect upon combining various research methods. Since many of the qualitative methods advantages are the quantitative methods disadvantages and the other way around, you would think that many papers would make use of both methods in order to get good data without any limitations. I feel when I have looked through the blog posts over the whole course that many papers only make use of one method. Of course there could be explanations for this, like lack of time, money or that the purpose only might be to get statistical data.

On the first seminar this week we discussed around qualitative research methods. Unfortunately the attendance was very low. We began as usual with discussing our qualitative papers and it was interesting to hear about the different qualitative methods that each paper has used. Though we only stumbled upon interviews and focus groups. The discussions lead to us choosing an interesting paper, for the course wiki, about the connection between information and communication technology and mental symptoms. This qualitative paper was based on an earlier quantitative one which was very interesting, thinking about my earlier discussion about combining methods.

After that we focused on a specific qualitative research method and looked at the descriptive pages on the wiki from last year about the various methods. Since we had read about interviews and focus groups in our papers we decided to pick one of those and since we did not have so much experience in focus groups we chose that method. We agreed very much with what the wiki page said already so we did not think it was necessary to change it. One of us, Andreas, had much experience in focus group from a marketing view though and we discussed that those seem to be very different to when doing it for research/science. Additionally we thought that focus groups could be a good complement to other research methods such as questionnaires/interviews where you get more individual answers. We also thought that a difficult problem with focus groups is to get everyone to talk, not having only a few dominating the discussions.

Unfortunately I could not attend Wednesday’s seminar due to other commitments but reading from the other blog posts, it seemed to have been good discussions about what case study research is. From the blog posts I draw upon that it feels like it can be hard to define what a case study is and what it is not.