I chose the paper The Self and Second Life: A Case Study Exploring the Emergence of Virtual Selves written by Simon Evans and published in the journal Computers in human behaviour (2.489)
Regarding which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper, their benefits and limitations, what I learnt about qualitative methods and the methodological problems within.
Evans conducted literature research to base his theory and hypothesis upon and also to construct interview questions. They had one hour interviews with 40 different people where the only similarity was their usage of Second Life (SL) The extraordinary with this research was that all of the interviews were conducted online through SL, with the respondents avatars as responders and almost no involvement with their Real Life (RL) which apparently has its advantages and disadvantages.
Evans didn't have to travel around the world to conduct the interviews since he could maintain them from his computer, there were no implications from time zone differences or similar. The interviews were conducted through SLs internal texting tool, which made it possible to download and analyze all of it.
The anonymity of the respondents was something that he questioned, will people be truthful in their responses? will it be effective with a written interview?
Qualitative methods can be used in different ways, and I assume that there is no right or wrong in the way to do it, only how effective or ineffective it may be. After reading the paper I think that he used a pretty ineffective method, but the circumstances required it and he made the best of it which is a baseline on qualitative methods, no case is normal, all of them have their irregularities that you have to adapt to.
The problem with qualitative methods is that you may never get any hard facts or evidence around your question, since it can be hard to interpret interview answers. Therefore I think qualitative research should be conducted after quantitative research and examination, and mainly to confirm your quantitative findings.
---
I chose the paper The tweets that killed a university: A case study investigating the use of traditional and social media in the closure of a state university written by Nicholas J. Kelling, Angela S. Kelling and John F. Lennon and published in the journal Computers in human behaviour (2.489)
Regarding the explanation of the definition of a case study to a first year university student and the analysis of my papers strengths and weaknesses.
The concept of a case study implies the explanatory or descriptive analysis of an event or person. You try to find the happenings around the event , what caused it, why and when and you study what effects the observed phenomena caused, and why it caused them. You try to find out everything relevant around the case.
The strengths of this paper was that it presented their theory rather instantly, which gives the reader a red thread to follow while reading. They used several methods to collect their data, mainly quantitative data datamined from social media sites and various forums to utilize and assess students opinions and actions. They based their hypothesis on a variety of literature in different research fields which all had a connection to their research, but their hypothesis got disproved, since they discovered that the majority of the datamined content came from non-students, and only 5.6% f the original source were students who had referred to more classical media tools. They came to the conclusion that classical methods of communicating and gathering opinions are not neglected.
Since the data were datamined they could check for correlations and affiliations between the different groups of data which opens up the possibility to investigate unknown relationships and causalities that may in the end prove important to the hypothesis.
The case study itself was interesting, but I didn't find it as effective as it could have been. For one thing the layout of the report was hard to read, since they included mathematical calculations in the flowing text, which made it hard to get an overall feeling for which can turn up to be ineffective if a contemplator wants to get a general feeling for the results. They didn't use any qualitative methods i.e. interviews.
They draw their conclusions on a percentage, which in my opinion can be wrong since they put the students participation in context with the whole society. Say for example that each and every student utilized Twitter to their fullest, and participated as much as they could, but they still only reached up to 5.6% since the rest of society outweighs them in pure numbers. Instead they should draw their conclusions on two factors, the one which they did (the percentage) but also to examine the group of students internally, see the average participation rate of each student. by doing this you can look upon the results from two different angles, which may alter your conclusion.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar