What I learned, week 51

This week has been about qualitative methods and about case study research. I think both of my papers give me some new experience when it comes to methods.

The paper I find that using qualitative paper (Lomanowska & Guitton, 2014) was about  find out more about the representation of pregnancy, birth and maternity in virtual environments, and the players behavior and opinion in this context.  The study was made in the game Second life, and the methods that were used were observation and analyzing. They was observing the game for nine months, the first six the month was to identify the main themes related to the activities in related Sims (avatars).  Related Sims was the Sims that has the word “pregnancy” or “maternity” as keyword. They used qualitative analysis of online material, in order to answer the “5Ws and H”, the question of: “who, what, when, where, why and how”.  The online content was 5 personal blogs, 3 journalistic reports, 2 interviews and one instructional blog.

Something that I find interesting in the methods was that the authors never made up their own questions for the research they only used online content. But after observing the game they made up some themes and analyzed of often the themed appeared. For

Example: to answer the question why? The made up the themes “Curiosity”, ”Progression of social aspects of virtual experience”, ”Emotional reasons related to real life needs and desires”, ”Sexual basis” and check how often the theme appeared in the media that they analyzed. I think it could be smart to use online content, because of the time saving. However I think this method is little weird, sense the media may not be complete, and bring all the reasons of why or one online content could have different approach compared to the others media. I don’t feel sure that the method gives any good or valid data at all.

The thing I learned most about this week is about case studies. Before this week I had almost heard of it when it’s related to HCI or market research. The case studies I read before has always been about testing some product in some way, or in a context, and then evaluate the users thoughts. So I thought that case studies was like a method to test something in some context and therefore required a user study as well. However I don’t think so anymore. In the I read this week (Fisher, Badam, & Elmqvist, 2014) they focused on the practical software engineering challenges inherent with building DUI (Distributed user interfaces) applications. They doing it by exploring three cases and with help of literature they come up with some challenges in the cases. To bring some solution they implemented three DUI applications, described in the cases and with some help of literature and by themselves they try bring some solution.  They don’t focus on things like interaction, and therefore don’t have a user study. I think they did a good research and discussed things like limitations, design guidelines and future extensions to the framework in a good way. So now I don’t see case study as a method anymore. Case study is when research uses one or some special cases to help for get some questions answered.  It’s several methods that is good compliment with case study, like analyzing, observation, dairies or interviews.

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