I’ve read the paper “Connected scholars: Examining the role of social media in research practices of faculty using the UTAUT model” by Gruzd et. al. (2012).
1. Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
In this paper they used semi-structured interviews to obtain the data from 51 members of the “American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Holding semi-structured interviews gives you a lot of qualitative data since you usually use more how, why, what and when questions so that there are rarely short answers. It lets the interviewer be in control of what questions is asked but doesn’t limit the interviewer to only those questions. If something relevant and interesting comes up the interviewer can ask follow-up questions to further investigate the subject (Robson, C. 2002). There are of course risks with using semi-structured interviews since some people doesn’t feel comfortable in sharing information in the unnatural setting that is an interview. There is also a small risk of asking too many follow-up questions and straying from the main topic but that is something that is up to the interviewer to not let happen.
2. What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
I don’t feel like I’ve learned anything new since I learned a lot when I wrote my bachelor thesis. We also used semi-structured interviews during our own thesis so the method was not unknown to me and I feel like actually using it myself gave me more insight in the method than reading about it could.
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
One of the methodological problems of the study is the fact that the first sets of interviews were face-to-face but some of the interviews were interviews held over the phone. This gives the study a variation of interviews that was not intended. Interviews over the phone are also a problem in itself because you can’t read the body language of the interviewee and therefore you can miss a lot of relevant information. Some interviews only lasted 15-minutes when some lasted 40-minutes and that are also something that isn’t ideal and that’s an area of the paper that could be improved. This is because interviews usually don’t give something useful if it lasts less than 30-minutes (Robson, C. 2002). I also think that the fact that the study wanted a wide spread of positions within the academic world among the interviewees but in fact ended up with 34 out of the 51 being professors, assistant professor or associate professor is a flaw since that is not actually a big spread when the majority is in the same position more or less. The same thing is a flaw when it comes to different areas were they also wanted a big spread, they had people from five different areas but 44 of them were from the “Library and Information science” area. This makes it a problem to draw conclusions from the different areas since some of them only had one participant.
I also read the paper “Social Media and Trust during the Gezi Protests in Turkey” by Haciyakupoglu and Zhang.
1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
A case study is a research method that examines one or several specific cases, persons or situations etc. Examples of a case study would be to examine how the people of Greece reacts towards their government in light of the economic crisis that is taking place there. A case study can also be built around several layers of analysis. Case studies are used to validate old or generate new theory and can use several other methods within itself, both qualitative and quantitative methods can be used either together or just one of them.
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.
I think that the paper have a good and defined research question, theoretical sampling, a specified population and they analyzed the gathered data using different methods. But it doesn’t use several different methods to gather data and it doesn’t combine qualitative and quantitative methods either. When it comes to flexible gathering and analyzing of the data and having an overlap between the two I don’t get an impression that they put any thought into it. This is the feeling I get over all with the paper and Eisenhardt’s process of building theory from case study research. It feels like they fail to mention a lot of the different areas of Eisenhardt’s process in the method part of the paper and whether this means that they didn’t take these into consideration, I don’t know.
One of the areas that could be improved is that only one of the 21 interviews was conducted face-to-face and as I mentioned earlier, you lose a lot of information when you can’t see the body language etc. One difference between the interviews in this paper and the interviews in Gruzd paper (the one about social media in research practices) is that here, the length of the interviews are much better. They were between 45 and 90 minutes which is a much better length to actually get good data.
Gruzd, A., Staves, K., & Wilk, A. (2012). Connected scholars: Examining the role of social media in research practices of faculty using the UTAUT model.Computers in Human Behavior, 28(6), 2340-2350.
Haciyakupoglu, G., & Zhang, W. (2015). Social Media and Trust during the Gezi Protests in Turkey. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication.
Robson, C. (2002). Real world research. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Om intervjuer sida 269-274. Om fokusgrupper sida 284-289. Om enkäter sida 241-248.
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