Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research (before)

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

The qualitative method that is used in the paper is individual semi-structured interviews. The authors of the paper interviewed a selected study group of 32 persons and had open-ended questions. They were as well tape-recorded so that they could analyze verbatim all the content. A complement to the method was that they examined the psychiatric of the students to see if they had any psychiatric disorders. From the analysis they could categorize the content and then find patterns and relations. By having semi-structured interviews with a specific selected group can give a lot of information, details and also new ideas for research. It is also good that recording can be done easily. One limitation was that sometimes the students (which were interviewed) spoke in general terms rather than their own experiences which and there is a risk that the person is lying when answering the questions. Another limitation is that a lot depends of the interviewer and how the questions are asked and so on.  

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

I learned that qualitative methods could be a good idea to collect data. In the paper the results were quite limited to the interviews and that is why the results could not be very reliable. This may be because of the number of factors that the paper did not bring up and collected by other methods. A lot of information and data can be collected by qualitative methods, but at the same time there are limitations.

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

That it is not generalized, the method only included the selective group of 32 people. It could have been improved by having used more than one method to get more content to analyze. 

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

A case study is an analysis of a specific situation in a specific place. It could be an event, a group of people or a village in a specific place and within a limited time frame. In a case study one can use several methods.

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 that I selected is “Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry”. According to the table 1 in the paper I’ve analyzed the strengths and weaknesses in the paper:

Getting started: Very clear research questions stated in the paper.

Selecting cases: The selection of three cases (social media sites for three pizza chains) is also very clear.

Crafting instruments and protocols: Quite detailed information about data collecting and which methods are used.

Entering the field: Field notes is described under “Findings” in the paper and writes detailed data, but not too much for a paper.

Analyzing data: The analysis is done in the discussion part of the paper. It could have been more analyzing, because it’s not too long and it is merged with the discussion.

Shaping hypothesis: In the results, the authors try to explain why the findings occur and how they connect to each other.

Enfolding literature: Comparison with other books, both conflicting and similar books is done throughout the whole paper. Not so much conflicting books, but it occurs.

Reaching closure: No theoretical saturation is made in the paper, but there are some answers and contributions to the research questions asked in the beginning of the paper.

Overall the case study paper has all the different processes and it is clearly written and has succeeded to write short and concisely but with all important steps.