Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

Humphreys, Lee, Thilo Von Pape, and Veronika Karnowski. "Evolving mobile media: Uses and conceptualizations of the mobile internet." Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication 18.4 (2013): 491-507. 

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

Humphrey et al. use semistructured one to one interviews. To ensure that participants (college students) felt more comfortable answering how they use mobile internet they hired student interviewers. They interviewed 21 students (germans and americans).
With the one to one interviews they are able to not only get the pure answer to the question, but also see their reactions. In their specific case many of the interviewees laughed at the question if they ever used the term 'mobile internet' thus having a deeper impact on the question than simply stating a "no" in a questionnaire.
On the other hand by using only this kind of interview it is more time consuming to conduct an interview thus limiting them in collecting a more representative number of samples and therefor also making it harder to generalize the outcome.

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

 Qualitative methods give the researcher a great opportunity to see the individuals reaction on a phenomena and give deeper insight on what people think about a specific topic or how exactly they use a specific technology. While this deeper insight helps find detailed information such as the reaction to the term mobile internet, it also limits the ability to draw more general conclusions from it.

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

Humphrey et al. themselves themselves answer that question in their conclusion:

Firstly the sample is too small to be representative. Secondly their methods did not disclose how long or how often the participants used mobile internet. And thirdly while the interviewees did talk about what they used the mobile internet for, this information is not linked to any evidence like it would be in a diary study and therefore can not be measured properly.

_______

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

Case Studies are researches of phenomena during a specific event or within a specific case. Instead of looking at a phenomena in a general way, researchers analyze how the phenomena occurred in that specific case and draw general conclusions from that.

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.

The case-study article I chose was "Emergency knowledge management and social media technologies: A case study of the 2010 Haitian earthquake"  by Dave Yates and Scott Paquette. They argue that Social media can play a crucial part in knowledge management during disaster response. In their case social media is not the classic type of Facebook, Youtube or Twitter, but Microsoft Share Point sites and wikis. Their analysis of previous studies revealed that they mostly looked at how such a disaster influenced individuals as well as society, however little research was done on how organizations that respond to disasters use social media.
The definition of their research question is therefore well founded since they took into account numerous previous studies and found that their question has not been answered yet. The steps of crafting instruments and protocols as well as entering the field are not entirely transparent in the paper. One of the authors is a reserve officer for the U.S. Air Force and got called in to help configuring the social media tools used by the crisis response team. Since it is a participatory action research, one might argue that it does not qualify as the best of methods for case study research. Then again only analyzing how others help in a disaster response team without helping themselves might be seen as immoral.
The analyzing of the data and the shaped hypothesis from that seem quite strong. They argue that the use of social media can indeed help share knowledge and speed up the decision making process. However it needs to be properly handled and assessed, otherwise it can lead to data overflow and misinformation. They also reach closure by looking at how the system helped deploy aid after one month and give an outlook on which parts to focus with further research as there are not many studies that look on the design of knowledge sharing in emergency response.
Altogether one could argue that this case-study is, given their unique situation of studying international aid during a catastrophe with over 200.000 people dead and 300.000 injured, quite strong and well researched.