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.