Theme 6: Qualitative and Case Study Research

Part 1

I chose to read ”Facebook and online privacy: attitudes, behavior and unintended consequences.”, published 2009 in the 15th issue Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The article uses literature research to present three frameworks which are in turn used to present four hypotheses along with four research questions.

Further on, data collection from university students along with eight interviews were conducted in order to confirm or falsify the hypotheses.

Broadening the age span as well as social groups and maybe even countries for the questionnaire would’ve yielded clearer results in my opinion. The authors refer simply to users and young adults in general, while the sample group was taken from a single college. Different ages and social groups would’ve allowed for comparison of how different life aspects affected peoples attitude towards online privacy and in turn, the conclusion of the questionnaire data. 

The benefits of literature research is the analysis and depth it often provides within a research field. By investigating the number of available literature within the given field in advance may also indicate whether there is enough material for drawing your own conclusions (or it may indicate that the topic in question already has been covered from the intended viewpoint). Properly chosen literature also allows a writer to focus at drawing new conclusions based on previous results, instead of having to compile them from scratch. Fortunately, the number of literature written is more than enough to cover many researching needs of writers.

It’s also a practical research method, as no coordination of interviewees, forms or other ways data collection is needed.

A limitation of said type of research is that it can get out of date when newer findings are made, as new literature refer back in time (i.e. old literature) whereas the other way around is yet to be seen. However, it’s a limitation which is dependent on the researcher, as it’s up to the researcher to make sure that he/she has the most up-to date sources. Writing a paper on an internet-related topic using literature from the 90-s would most probably result in many faulty conclusions (it may be a far fetched example, but it illustrates my point).

The benefits of interviews is that they offer an in-depth view on a subject from the respondents perspective. It allows to get answers to the ”why” and ”how”-questions which are necessary to get a better understanding of a topic. Additionally, an interview situation allows the interviewer to ask follow up questions to certain answers, unlike quantitative methods, which opt out the flexibility and in-depth possibilities for the benefit of a greater amount of data.

As for practicality, the interviews have the downside of having the need to be planned before being executed, the difficulty of which is determined by the schedule of the subject to be interviewed (which in turn isn’t entirely in the hands of the researcher).

Part 2

A case study is, in short, an examination of an event using a set of different analytical tools, often to get an answer to questions or to formulate a theory applicable to similar cases.

The article I chose is ”The tweets that killed a university: A case study investigating the use of traditional and social media in the closure of a state university”, published in the journal of Computers in Human Behavior issue 29, 2013. As the title suggests, the authors seek to investigate a single event and not a more general phenomenon, which explains the number of cases examined in this article being limited to one. As the question under investigation is quite specific and the event is one in it’s kind as far as I know, I don’t see the need for additional cases to be analyzed.

The article starts off by a brief explanation of the event, as well as a number of sub-topics, which are referred to later on in the data collection and analysis for validation. The information for the sub-topics was gathered from external research and not conducted by the authors themselves. As for the data-collection, the authors used two main methods: questionnaire and data mining analysis. Besides questions for the main topic, the questionnaire also contained questions used to confirm or disprove previous findings described in the sub-topics (in the end confirming them). In the end, the data mining analysis was coupled with the results from the questionnaire to further strengthen the findings. As the purpose of the study wasn’t as much to form a theory as to study a single event, the result wasn’t a model of any kind, but rather a discussion of results and proposals for similar situations in the future.