Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
The paper is a study about how people use search engines and the results they get from it. Even though it could be irrelevant to the topic at hand people read the first “hits” they get, and if it’s a conflicting topic it could be wise to look further than just these top results. They did a qualitative study where they made 67 students with an average of 10 years computer-experience (and internet usage of 7 years) bookmark two pages that best could give someone that didn’t know how to reduce greenhouse gas emission this information. When they bookmarked the pages they asked the students if they had considered the following three criteria: (1) the link position in the list, (2) whether the page provided topically relevant information, and (3) whether the page provided trustworthy information.
What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?I’m gona start with the quote I used during theme 4: “Qualitative researchers aim to gather an in-depth understanding of human behavior and the reasons that govern such behavior.” The benefits is that you get the: “why and how of decision making, not just what, where, when. Hence, smaller but focused samples are more often used than large samples.” And in the paper they wanted to explore why and how we use a search engine and the top “hits” we get. What I learned from this paper is that you always have to consider the variation of many things, not just computer-experience. People have knowledge since before about a subject, if they are interested, if they believe the information that is given, and the list goes on, because everyone is different, in many ways. Many ways.
Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?They actually mention this themself, the limitations of their study and what should be considerd for future research: “Finally, it should be acknowledged that the present study comes with certain limitations, which must be considered when interpreting the results. First, in the bookmarking task we explicitly instructed participants to select the two pages that best covered the topic and to indicate whether or not they had considered a given set of criteria for their bookmarking. These self-reports might be prone to social desirability biases, and so might differ from their normal bookmarking and evaluation behavior (cf. Flanagin & Metzger, 2007). Second, for the sake of experimental control, we introduced some constraints in our study. That is, the participants conducted their Web search in a laboratory setting for a single predefined search topic with a finite set of only 10 Web pages. Moreover, the setting did not allow the participants to enter their own search terms in the search engine. Therefore, further research is required to extend the findings of the present study to other search topics and to more natural search situations. Finally, the present study did not examine what the participants had learned from their Web search, or to which information and sources they would refer when writing an essay about the searched topic. This should be addressed in future studies”
Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
A case study is a way of using a single or several examples of “real-life” phenomena, events or persons to analyze and consequently derive conclusions. Methodologies used in case study research usually include combinations of qualitative and/or quantitative methods as well as empirical and theoretical studies. It can involve different cases and multiple levels of analysis.
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.
I choose the paper: The tweets that killed a university: A case study investigating the use of traditional and social media in the closure of a state university. Nicholas J. Kelling, Angela S. Kelling, John F. Lennon. (2013). And they investigated how various forms of media were used during this event, foremost twitter. A campus wide survey was combined with social and online media monitoring to assess the topics, authors, and methods used during prominent discussions during and preceding the closure of the University of South Florida Polytechnic (USFP).So, in the article “Building Theories from Case Study Research” Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). we are given a table that we should use to analyze a case study research, so lets do that. The step “Getting started” and the activity “definition of research question” is something they did in my paper and it’s quite clear what they are looking for. The second step “Selecting cases” and the activity “specified population” is something they in the paper also make use of, they have a specified group of people namely students at the USFP. The step “Crafting instruments and protocols” have the activity “multiple data collection methods” and in my paper they did this as well, they sent out a survey (which itself is not so good at getting more information that you might have needed, so I would say that that was a weakness for this paper. But nonetheless they used this quantitative method) and they collected data from different media sources.
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