Theme 6 Pre

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

Select a media technology research paper that is using qualitative methods.

The journal I choose was “Computers in Human Behavior”, with an impact factor of 2.273. The title of the article I interest is “Sheltered in cyberspace? Computer use among the unsheltered ‘street’ homeless” by Karin M. Eyrich-Garg and published on January 2011.

1.    Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

The paper I read is using an open-ended interview with in-depth detail about the history of housing, shelter and homelessness. The gathered data is verified with the Homeless Supplement to the Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS/HS). After that, the interview data is transcribed to obtain empirical properties, and then they must enter the empirical data to SPSS application in order to analyze by quantitative methods. 

Advantages of using an open-ended interview is the researcher can get more knowledge than was expected since more open discussion might emerge from the interview and this might lead to other information shared than expected. Also, it is possible to record body gesture or emotion from interviewees and this could be an additional contribution to the findings.

The limitation is, it might be difficult and time consuming to prepare and conduct interview to all respondents, also according to the paper, they need some money to get homeless people as their respondent.

2.    What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?

In this paper they mention 2 reasons why they use qualitative methods. Firstly, it is easier to record the interview data from homeless people, moreover some of them give some additional explanation regarding their initial answer. Secondly, qualitative method can be used to verify the data with follow-up questions to determine the consistency. Also, in order to conduct this interview they must prepare lots of resources, like number of interviewers, location and time, also money to attract the respondent.

 

3.    Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

There are 2 methodological problems in this paper. Firstly, the generalizability of the research finding is unknown because participant were recruited using a nonrandom sampling technique from one area. Secondly, the reliability and validity of the technology interview question is still unknown because the instrument and the psychometric properties have not been tested.

Select a media technology research paper that is using the case study research method.

The journal I choose was “Software, IEEE”, with an impact factor of 1.23. The title of the article I interest is “Developing Cloud Business Models: A Case Study on Cloud Gaming” by Arto Ojala and Pasi Tyrväinen and published on August 2011.

1.    Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.

From kth.se, “a case study is a way of using a single or several examples of “real-life” phenomena, events or persons to analyze and consequently derive conclusions”. In my opinion, a case study is a strategy to analyses an example object (persons, organization, project, invention, etc.) that are studied with various method to gather the data. The methodologies can be a combination of data collection method, such as interview, questionnaire, observation, reading text for content analysis, etc.

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 this paper, the researcher want to show that a small software firm can compete with the multinational software corporation using cloud computing. The researcher chooses gaming industry for case study, specific to G-Cluster firm, because games features from both software and media industries. In this study, they aim to explore the reasons behind the changes to the software and business model and benefit from this change.

In order to gather the data, they conduct an open-ended interview during 2005 and 2010 with key persons in the firm. In addition, they also gather press release information and website to gather additional data. After analyzing the data, they point out why G-cluster can survive, such as: adapt to infrastructure technology changes and business model can be changed dynamically.

The strength of this paper is the researcher gave us a narrative overview when presenting the information about the object of case studies. The advantages of this technique is an opportunity to narratives their experiences in ways that were personally meaningful, rather than imposing pre-assigned response categories on their experiences. However, it have certain limitation, it is very time consuming to observe and get more information from respondents. In this research, they take almost 5 year to conclude the research.