Arozin - Qualitative methods and case study, reflection

This week was the last week on the course, and reflected on the last theme which was qualitative methods and case studies. First we discussed the definition of a case, and later the definition of a case study.  The general idea is that a case is a happening or a phenomena in a specific field that can be analyzed to answer a hypothesis in another field. I read a paper where the author made a case study of the closure of a university where students came with opinions and protested through twitter. Even though the researcher only made a case study of one case rather than 4-10 which are needed the paper still showed the general idea of a case study. I think that case study is a well used concept with an unknown name, this since we use cases and the knowledge of late experiences to construct a definition of a hypothesis of something which are being observed. If we don't have the knowledge we can Google it and get the information required. I think that case studies is the name of a more well structured way of gathering information of something, molded after its application on scientific papers or similar, while the more common usage of case studies are used every day by the regular people.

The next part we discussed was the definition and usage of qualitative methods in general and in application on case studies. The definition of qualitative methods have been discussed back and forth throughout the course,  but during this week I read something for the first time where they applied a qualitative method. As I mentioned in my previous blog post it was about a research conducted through Second Life, and the approach to the qualitative interview that took place. This paper gave me a concrete example of the pros n' cons of different qualitative methods which we discussed through the seminar. We also had to approach the aspect of using quantitative methods in combination with qualitative while conducting a case study. From all of this we concluded that case studies are good in general and can result in good data for your research, but you have to conduct several of them to get a good overview. You also have to adapt the data acquired from different cases so they are all going in the same direction without altering the original data itself. As with everything else conducted in the name of science you will have to refer to it, now especially when it comes to external cases that had nothing to do with your research in the first place.

I think this last theme was really good, and I got the impression that all the themes we had before built up to this last one.