Seminar 6

During the last seminar of the course we discussed what a case study is. Leif talked about two examples of case studies. He mentioned the police and said that solving a crime could be seen as a case study. He also mentioned doctors as an example, he said that examining and treating a sick person could be seen as a case study (since the symptoms are tied to one person).

Most interesting was when Leif said that a case study is when observing an object/a phenomena that already exists. The object or phenomena that you're observing isn't created by your study, and that defines the case study. You want to understand an event, a patient, a criminal etc. to see why things happen as they do. You do not create methods in order to find new data is my understanding of this, but instead you analyze data from previous, similar cases in order to further understand a specific phenomena. Like Haibo said in his lecture, you should put more time and effort into defining the actual problem instead of designing methods for solving it (since you don't know what you're actually solving if you don't know what problem you've got).

Another thing we discussed, which I agree with, is the importance of researchers with different academic backgrounds in a case study. It is easy to get caught up in a certain way of thinking if your drilled like that. Take us engineers as an example, it's to always think in terms of right and wrong, black and white since that is our background (lots of math, I know). But that way of approaching a problem isn't always plausible, and even if you think that you've solved the problem you still have to convince other people (with different kinds of backgrounds) that your solution is "the right one".

It was a bit confusing, the definition of a case study, but I still think I got a little bit wiser in the field of case studies.

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

I've chosen the article "Facebook and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Unintended Consequences" from the journal of computer mediated communication. 

1. Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
   In this article the researchers combine a quantitative method with a qualitative one. Like I wrote in my last text, this is exactly what we did in our exam assignment earlier this spring. Our paper was about what makes university students click/ignore political material on Facebook. At first we conducted a quantitative survey with, I think, 68 persons and then we ask people to volunteer for a smaller, qualitative study in which 10 students participated. In this study we were able to go deeper and ask questions about the empirical patters that we've discovered in our survey. Even though this article is about a different matter it's still the same design of their method as our. First a survey with a bigger group of people (quantitative) and then deeper, follow-up questions for a smaller group on these results (qualitative). The benefit of combining the two methods is to first locate what is actually happening and then why these things happen. You can see how people in general act about a certain matter through a survey and then actually understand why they act that way, which makes it possible to gain deeper understanding of a problem.
2. What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
   Not that much that I didn't already know I would say. What did differ in their way of conducting their qualitative interviews compared to our interviews is in the way they categorized their answers."(A) Salience—interesting or unusual expressions that indicate significance and/or emotional involvement; (B) metaphors, analogies, and similes—particularly with respect to how interviewees conceptualize facebook and their use of it; (C) ellipses and allusions—particularly implicit or indirect reference to connotations and background knowledge; (D) moral judgments and value statements."
   
   I think it's an interesting way of categorizing the participants answers, we thought about this when we were doing our study but we never actually categorized them in anyway. We tried to see if some answers were more common among our participants and then we chose a couple of quotes that we thought was interesting and differed from others. But this way of categorizing is a way better way to present the contained data.
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
   The biggest problem in combining a quantitative method with a qualitative one is generalizing I would say. Since they are trying to find out why people in their study answered like they did in the survey it's easy to take the answers from the qualitative interviews and just apply them to all of the answers of the survey when in fact, these answers are only applicable on the people participating in the qualitative study. It's easy, and tempting, to generalize and apply findings from the qualitative study on the quantitative one since it's easier to draw conclusions then.

The article I've chosen for the second task is called "Interactivity in the daily routines of online newsrooms: Dealing with an uncomfortable myth" and was published in the Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication.

1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
   A case study is a research method aiming at gaining deeper knowledge of the area that you're studying. Usually you focus on one or two cases in order to gain deeper and more detailed knowledge than you could through lets say a survey. Case studies are usually carried out in an empirical way where you collect data by going out "in reality" and collect data.
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.
   In the beginning of the paper the authors explains their aim of the paper and give some context to the reader. They conduct a quite comprehensive literature review in order to explain a lot of expressions and myths regarding online journalism. The authors propose that there is a myth among journalists regarding interactivity in online journalism. After they've conducted the literature review as a way of explaining their aim they move on to their case study. They study four news papers websites and they have chosen four websites are part of the same European regional media system, Catalonia, and are devoted to general interest news of the region. The reason for choosing the european region is that the authors says that there are a lot of studies done in the US about this field but not in Europe. They want to encourage other researchers to pursue its approach, as it helps in tracing the diversity and commonalities in the development of the Internet as a news medium.
   Observations of these newspapers and their work routines were conducted in 2003, which feels a bit old of you ask me since the paper is written 5 years later and knowing how much and fast the digital media industry is changing I think that these observations feel rather old. The author does how ever in a very consistent way link back to the myths that he talks about in the literature review which is good. A strength in the data collection though is that they combine their observations with a lot of qualitative interviews which makes the data feel more valid, if it's a bit old.
   At the end of the paper in the discussion I think that they link nicely with earlier, similar literature. They compare the previous US studies with this European study and say that even though there are some cultural differences there are a lot of equal factors to these studies when it comes to forming strategies of online newspapers and the interactivity of them.
   
   Overall a well executed study even though I think that they should have mentioned a bit about how the data used in the case studies could be a bit out-of-date considering how fast things actually changes in this business these days.
3. 

Theme 5: reflection

Today at the lecture, Sallnäs talked a lot about her research in the field of haptic collaborative interfaces. To be honest, I have a hard time seeing the point of this lecture in this course. Since the lecture was very focused on her research, which to me wasn't that appealing to be honest, I had a little bit of trouble to stay focused during the whole session.

What I did pick up was when she talked about the so called white spots, which could be explained as an area that you're no that familiar with. What Sallnäs said when she mentioned this was that when you're doing research in an area that you're not that familiar with you should go with a qualitative method rather than a quantitative one.

Like I said in the beginning I had a hard time to actually see the point of this lecture since I think it was mainly aimed at research in the haptic field. I think that the quantitative methods kind of fell out from the agenda.

Theme 5: Design research

1. How can media technologies be evaluated?
   After reading Mr Li and his colleagues study I think that are a couple of different things that has to be considered when evaluating media technology. First of all the technology itself has to be evaluated of course. How good is the technology? Does it fulfill its purpose? What is its purpose? Also, since almost all media technology today is connected to the Internet, you have to think about what network your technology is aiming at. You also have to take into consideration the people using/supposed to use the technology. How do they experience the technology? How will it affect them and their lives? Are people ready for this technology or will it need regulations such as laws and user restrictions? In the article they use the ISO recommendations for usability (which is defined as effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction) in order to evaluate the usability of their media technology.
2. What role will prototypes play in research?
   A rather big role I think since today you can construct very realistic prototypes through either CAD-software or by the help of 3D-printers. I think that the better and more powerful tools we gain access to, when talking in terms of constructing prototypes, the more picky are people going to be. They want things that feels real and looks real, they don't just want it to be a picture inside their head. Like Haibo Li and his colleagues said in their conclusion (who were using a rather simple prototype in their study), "people participating in the study were interested in their product but the test prototype alone wasn't enough to make the users willing to buy it".
3. Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?
   I think that the most obvious reason would be to actually get people interested in investing money into an idea/concept. If you're having trouble finding people interested in an invention then you could break down the problem into smaller pieces, creating a proof of concept prototype, showing that your concept actually work so that they won't have to buy the pig in a poke. If you show people that your proof of concept prototype work then they might be willing to invest enough for you to create an actual prototype.
4. What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?
   I would say that the biggest limitation within a prototype is the risk of locking someone in to an idea of how something should look like. The more complex and real a prototype can look like the harder will it be to determine prototype from an actual product and I think that there's a risk of locking people in to a prototype. With more primitive sketches, thoughts and ideas you're more open to how the final product should look like, leaving more up to fantasy.One of the main characteristics of a prototype I would say is that it's main purpose is to test the concept/idea that you've come up with. To actually see if the concept looks like/works like you want it do in real life.
5. How can design research be communicated/presented?
   Mainly through sketches, mock-ups and diagrams. In some kind of illustrated way I think without too much text so that the viewer has to think for him-/herself. Today you also have the choice of rendering illustrations and movies on your computer of course which is also an high-fidelity alternative. But then again I would say that the low fidelity sketches and mock-ups has it pros as well, leaving more to imagination.

How does a collaborative setting differ from a single user setting as regards methodology used and the results obtained?

When in a collaborative setting you have multiple (at least two, kind of obvious) persons that can interact and share experiences with each other, which would be the biggest difference to a single user setting I suppose. The biggest difference in the results obtained I guess would be that in the case of collaborative settings the participants are able to influence each other, which could change the results quite severely. In single user settings you get more individualized results but then again if you're testing something that is supposed to be used in groups then these results could get quite misleading.

How can qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study complement each other?

This spring when we wrote our exam assignment we combined a quantitative method with a qualitative method. The biggest benefit with this was that we could first analyze the empirical patterns from our quantitative method and then shape our qualitative study after the results from quantitative study in order to conduct a deeper analysis of the empirical patterns that we found. In our qualitative study we were able to further understand why the participants acted like they did in our quantitative study.

How can using both subjective and objective methods give a better understanding of a phenomenon?

The answer to this question isn't that different to the previous question, they complement each other. You use an objective method to understand what is happening and then the subjective method to understand why it is happening.

Seminar 4

This seminar wasn't actually called a seminar, it was called a workshop and the design of it was a bit different to the previous seminars. We were two groups in one this time, which caused a bit of chaos but worked out okay in the end I think. During the workshop we discussed quantitative methods vs. qualitative methods and their pros and cons. This weeks' text, the one written by Olle Bälter and colleagues, was about a quantitative study which illustrated very well the problems that can occur in such a study.

There are always a risk of dropouts in big surveys since people might feel like "they are just a drop in the ocean". During the seminar Olle talked about a couple of steps that could/should use in order to prevent the dropouts actually dropping out. It was a chain of communication in which you should start out by inviting people to your survey through mail (actual mail, not e-mail) in which you either include a paper survey or a password and a url were they can conduct the study online. After that, for those that didn't participate, you should remind them through mail followed by a call and perhaps a last letter. The key to all of this, no matter in which order you conduct these steps, is to treat these people with respect and don't try to force them into anything.

Another tip is to construct the survey in a way were the participants actually gain something from it. For example, Olle showed us a survey from Karolinska Institutet which was about food and health, and in the survey you could type in your length and weight and then get your BMI. And with your BMI a text that said somethings about it to keep the participant interested in the survey.

I think that the last thing, the interactive survey, shows a good example of how you can benefit from conducting studies on a digital platform instead of on paper. (Other than just the distribution part). A simple way of actually "tricking" people into a survey. This was the most interesting epiphany from this weeks theme I would say.