Theme 6 Reflection

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

These week seminar is the last seminar for our Theory and Method for Media Technology course. In this seminar Mr. Leif Dahlberg gives explanation mainly of case study research. During the seminar, he divided us into small team to discuss about case study paper that we choose before the seminar. In this small team, we try to explain the method of case study that used by the paper to each other, and if possible, to determine and identify the differences between case study research and the other research method. After this small discussion, we discuss together with all students about the case study itself.

First, we try to discuss a case study. A case study at least define by 2 things, first is defining what scenario for the paper or selecting a case for your study. This case can be created by the researcher, because sometimes the researcher invented the case that does not exist. Another method is to look for something that is already happening out there, because most of the cases are already exist, like market research, content, etc. Second, we need to define the method we use to analyze the data, we can use quantitative method, qualitative or both depend on the case we want to explore.

In this seminar, Leif’s give several examples of case study research. First is when the researcher does some case study research about demographic study in the airport. The target of this study is to find out how the society works in the immigration section at the airport, the researcher tries to determine the pattern that people is not treated in the same way when they pass the security gate at the airport. Second is an example when the police investigate a case to solve the problem. The police conduct research base on the evidence left at the crime scene.

The most interesting in this seminar is when Leif’s said that the case studies using an inductive method to solve the problem, in this method we begin to observe the fact and find the pattern base on several cases, after that we can get a tentative hypothesis and finally give birth to a theory. It is opposite of other research in the previous theme. Also, the case study is observe an object/scenario that already exist and the amount of data is abundant, you will never shortage the data when conducting case study research. However, these huge amounts of data can give us difficulty to make an assumption to conclude the research. Because of that the ideal number of cases when conducting a study case is 4 to 10 cases. It is possible to have 1 case for case studies, but the result can become a weak theory.

Lastly, he explained a bit about discourse analysis for case study. When doing this research, the researcher usually collects the sample of material paper that have an interest in the case study research. The paper that already selected than coded by another person. This person must professional in their field relevant to the research object. To guarantee the objectivity, we can compare the result of the coding with the same paper and make sure this result is same. After we get this coding, we can proceed with the inductive method to analyze the result further.