After theme 6

As usual, I feel I like alot of things I was thinking about during my preparation has slided into place during this weeks seminars.

The first seminar was focused on qualitative methods. My group came to discuss the diary method quite a lot, as neither of us had heard much about if before. It was very interesting talking about, and hear what Stefan Hrastinski had to say about it. It’s an interesting method and, if you believe Stefan, it might become more used in the future as it is a very good way to research changes over time.

As I did not mention case studies in my previous post, I’m going to present the article I read. It is called Interactivity in the daily routines of online newsrooms: dealing with an uncomfortable myth by David Domingo (2008). In the paper the author describes a case study he did on four different online newspapers in Catalonia on how the different newspapers handled comments and other types of reader participation in the news making process.

As we discovered in the second seminar, this paper was quite a good example of a case study. The author uses a combination of different methods, both observations and informal interviews as the basis for his conclusions and he also does an extensive theoretical study to put his findings in perspective. A possible weakness of the study however, according to the paper Building Theories from Case Study Research by Eisenhardt (1989), is that the case study does not use any form of quantitative methods and that the researcher is making the observations alone. On the other hand, the study bases its conclusions on four different cases, which could help the researcher find different perspectives on the same phenomena.

I reflected, right when I started reading Eisenhardt’s paper that “case study” is a term that I felt quite comfortable throwing around, but in reality I had very little knowledge of what I really meant. In the second seminar I quickly understood that it wasn’t just me who had troubles understanding exactly what a case study is. Even our Stefan Hrastinski admitted it could be hard to keep track of.

So, what actually characterizes a case study? What I’ve learnt this week is that the real-world aspect is an absolute requirement. The study has to be done in the real world and whatever thing you are researching, people, organizations, etc, has to be in a real environment doing real things. This means experiments, or any kind of situation created by the researcher, is not a case study.

But apart from the study being done on real-world subjects, a case study has very few requirements. Instead there are many features that are usually seen in a case study in some combination. For example, a case study often uses combination of methods and the goal is often to acquire deeper knowledge of a subject.