Sem 6

The paper I find use both qualitative methods and some quantitative method.(Lomanowska & Guitton, 2014)

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

They mainly used observation as method. But also did some qualitative analyses on online material, like videos, blogs, interviews and journalistic report. Observations could help the author to get some depth in the research, and also get some understanding in things the author is not familiar with. It could be helpful to see what is really happening and what questions could be made from the observation. However, it could be hard to observe everything, and things could be missed. Observations alone don’t answer all the important questions, like the question “why?” Like in the study I read, when the author do observations on player for an online computer game. If they a player do something, it could be hard to say why the player did as the player did. Even how the player did it isn’t obvious. So all questions could be hard to answer with just observation.

The paper I read use analyzing to answer the “5Ws and H”, the questions of “Who, what, when, where, way and how”. Analyzing could be good if there exist something that is good for the study. However it could be sometimes be hard to find answer on a specific question and the author can’t know for sure if it is an extreme case or general case that being analyzed.

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

 I’m not sure however I learned something new or not when I read the text. However, I think that many times quantity methods could be a good complement to quality methods, and also I think the text show that and used the both types of methods in good way.

Something that could be consider as new, is the fact that they didn’t get their own inputs with there own interviews, focus group or something similar. They just observed and analyzed things that already exist on the Internet. I have never had that idea of studding some interview that someone else have done and posted online. I like to make my on questionnaire, and get my “own inputs”. However, if you find something that you think is good and answers your question, why spend time on do the same thing someone else already have done?

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

I think they used the methods in a good way and don’t see any problem in the method. Maybe the fact that they did not made there own interviews, and only observed how thing work and analyzed things that already done. They don’t even ask their own questions with the quantity method, where they analyzed several video dairies. When a behavior is explode, usually the author make up some specific questions that they bring to the participants. However it didn’t seem to be necessary to answer all of the author’s questions.

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

Case study is a study to observe how something works in practical. Could be some technical device in a new context, or how well something really works. The user could be asked to speak out the thought while he/she uses the devise. If the author can’t be present while the participant uses the device, the participant could write diaries about the usage. After the test period with the device, an interview or similar with the participant is a good Idea, to understand the participants thoughts. It’s not always that it exist participants, but cases could be study with related work as well.

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.

My paper is pretty close to a design study, and with help of related works explores some problems and tries to give solutions on the concept of DUI (Fisher, Badam, & Elmqvist, 2014). The have cases of DUI that they explore and there emphasis was on the “practical software engineering challenges inherent with building DUI applications”. So they don’t have things like explore things like interaction, they don’t really have participants (maybe them self) and explore problem in things like  ”data transfer”, limited resources. So they don’t have any specified population, and I think they only have one way to collect data (analyzing previous and related work). However, they make good use of the analyzing and argue well. Think they have most of the things from table one, except things like “specified population, several methods”.

References:

Fisher, E. R., Badam, S. K., & Elmqvist, N. (2014). Designing peer-to-peer distributed user interfaces: Case studies on building distributed applications. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 72(1), 100–110. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2013.08.011

Lomanowska, A. M., & Guitton, M. J. (2014). My avatar is pregnant! Representation of pregnancy, birth, and maternity in a virtual world. Computers in Human Behavior, 31(0), 322–331. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.10.058