Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research (after)
Zulfiya Tarazova
References to
the paper: N. B. Ellison, C. Steinfield, C. Lampe (2007) The
Benefits of Facebook ‘‘Friends:’’ Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online
Social Network Sites, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 1143–116.
For my seminar about case study
research I read article about the Benefits of Facebook ‘‘Friends:’’ Social
Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites. In this paper
the researcher combined different kinds of methods – quantitative and
qualitative. They tried to investigate the influence of Social net on the
relationship between young users.
The
strengths and weaknesses of my selected paper: strengths are that the
researcher used a lot of quantitative data and illustrated it through a table.
The weaknesses are that the authors of the research do not use a lot of
qualitative methods like an interview, investigation focus group of people.
After reading articles and
discussions in the seminar I’ll try to explain the main aspects of the case
study research and gave a definition for it. So, case study is a complex methodology
that tries to explain a phenomenon or situation. An explanatory case study is
used to explore causation in order to find underlying principles.
The lecturer told us about
researchers that conducted research in the airport. They observed the behavior
of people at the airport and analyzed this database. Case study includes
different kind of method like an interview, observation, analysis of documents
and etc. The Lecturer further talked about the amount of materials needed, for
example, if researcher takes an interview it should be more than ten people.
If the researcher wants to formulate a theory, he needs to base it on
three cases.
Hey!
ОтветитьУдалитьIt seems like you have grasped this week's theme very well. It is very interesting to read different blogposts about theme 6 because everyone writes different examples that Leif brought up during the seminar. At our seminar he brought up the case of the disease ADHD and that you can investigate it through several different views and use several different methods as well! Interesting that you need a "specific" amount of materials for it to become a case-study, but then I guess, because a case-study investigates a phenomenon more thoroughly, you will probably need a big amount of data from different kinds of studies :) Good job!
/Hannah
Hi, Hannah!
УдалитьThank you for your comment)
Hi!
ОтветитьУдалитьNice reflection!
To further describe the concept of case studies I can ad what I think was Leif´s main two things that define a case study.
Firstly, it is important to have a specific scenario or a limited research area to perform a case study at. You can use one or several scenarios to perform the case study at. Secondly, a case study is defined by its method. A case study consists of a number of different methods. It can be both qualitative and quantitative methods, only qualitative methods or only quantitative methods.
Hopefully I contributed with some information about what I perceive as a case study.
Hi, Charlotte! Thank you for additional information. Specific scenario and special the case studies methods are really important themes in the definition of "case study".
Удалить