Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Monday, October 17, 2016
Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research, post 2
This week we learned about qualitative and case study research, something I was quite familiar with. As I did my bachelor's in arts, I used mostly qualitative methods during my first three years. A lot of focus during my bachelor's was put on interviews and interview technique, something I found quite interesting. We did a lot of interviews, both in person, via skype, and via telephone, during my BA, and it’s one of my favorite ways of doing research. You really get to know people, see how people react and interact, and I feel like you (most often) get honest and real answers. This of course depends on what your researching, but as I did my BA in media and arts, it was a lot about behavior, interaction with media, opinions, and habits etc.
The qualitative research paper I chose for this week, Appearance-related cyberbullying: A qualitative investigation of characteristics, content, reasons, and effects, was done via interviews, and was (just as the title tells you) researching about appearance-related cyber bullying. I found the paper very interesting, and I think that kind of research is very important. It was interesting to read about the ethics review board, their method had been approved, but this is something I didn’t encounter during my bachelor's (maybe I should have?). I found it interesting to read about how they had selected their participants, and this is always something that’s discussed when doing research. Do we take the people easiest accessible? People from different ethnicities? From different geographical areas? Different ages? I think here it’s important to be very clear about what you’re trying to find out, will it add value to the research to have participants in different areas etc.? and if so, how?
This makes me think of what we discussed during last week’s theme, that no two people are alike, so the participants in a study are very important. If you replicate their research with different participants, even if they’re chosen based on the same criteria, odds are the result will be different. Something I think is very important to keep in mind when doing any research.
Case study is something I was a little less familiar with, but still felt I had a decent grasp on. I found it very interesting and something I might want to explore further. To my understanding, a case study explores a specific event, group, company, phenomenon, etc. and can be very valuable when there’s not enough information to formulate a research question. That it’s not always the answer to the question itself, but rather to come up with questions. In the beginning I thought case study would be more specific, however, I now understand that it seeks to explore a specific question in depth, even if the outset is more general. For example, my chosen case study research paper was about Twitter and investigated the use of traditional and social media in the closure of the university South Florida Polytechnic (USFP). Even though it was quite specific, one university only, it could have been investigating the correlation between Twitter and education, doing surveys and looking at data from different universities, and it would still be a case study.
I found this theme quite interesting, and even though I was really sick throughout this week and couldn’t make it to any of the seminars, I still learned a lot. I wish I hadn’t been so ill, as I do find this theme interesting, and it would have been very beneficial to discuss it with my co-students and hear their thoughts, but that’s life I guess.
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