The comments

Unfortunately I have been unable to post comments on my fellow students blogs. However I have attempted to answer questions posted to my blog and that is what you will find below.

From http://dm2572-jakob.blogspot.se/2013/11/theme-1-theory-of-science.html#comments:

Hi! It has taken me a while to answer this, because honestly I found this part of Russells arguments a bit confusing. As I understood it, Russell argues that we don't know everything by experience, but we should still be able to describe and transfer knowledge that we have not verified first hand. Russell then introduces a ton of names that I find quite confusing, but what's important for us, who are interested in knowledge, is that Russell finds that we can describe something, that is true, without actually knowing the real object first hand. Therefore we can transfer knowledge through history, without constantly having to rediscover it.

I really liked that example Russell used. To me, it sounds like Russell is saying that sometimes philosophers try to contradict what should be obvious to everyone, and that is kind of stupid.
I agree with you that in philosophy, (and in science in general really), what conclusions we reach are usually influenced by our prejudice and ideas. This is an old problem and therefore I found it interesting how Russell implied that some things are so obvious, everybody should get it. I may be interpreting him wrongly, and I'm not sure if I agree, but I really like the thought. 

From http://dm2572-jakob.blogspot.se/2013/11/theme-4-quantitative-research.html#comments:

 I believe we all agree, isn't that nice :)
Though I would like to add that a skilled researcher should be able to phrase the questions in a way that minimizes the risk of results being consistently exaggerated, for example.

From http://dm2572-jakob.blogspot.se/2013/12/theme-6-qualitative-and-case-study.html#comments:

Hi!
I'd like to elaborate on the use of focus groups. I helped set up a focus group with teachers at KTH when doing my bachelors thesis. One of the reasons for doing a focus group as opposed to interviews was that we was hoping the discussions in the group would bring up points we would not have thought about asking in an interview. In general I believe focus groups can be a good way to understand how a group operates, maybe at the cost of a more nuanced perspective each individual group member could provide in an interview. 

Hi!The thing about this study is that the researchers was looking mostly at the thought process of the Facebook users interviewed. I believe those kinds of results could be difficult to obtain from a questionnaire study.On the other hand, a questionnaire or another type of quantitative study could be a great way to follow this up, and insure the results hold up when looked at from a different perspective. 

The thing they discovered was that many of their informants were directing a lot of attention to managing their social networks, for example categorizing their contacts into lists. They realized this area had received little attention in other studies and redirected their study to also include these types of reasoning. What I would like to know, however, is what their study looked like before doing this. 
I think, in general, this is some kind of a best case scenario where the researchers know their field well enough to realize what they are observing has not been very studied. It's probably a good idea to at least try to keep an eye out for situations like this when doing you own research... 

 

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.

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

So, we’re at the final week of the course. The theme is Qualitative and Case Study research. I feel like I already know much about qualitative research from doing my bachelors thesis, as it came up quite a lot when talking about quantitative research, but there’s always more to learn!

To find a good research paper using qualitative methods I went to my new favorite journal, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, with an impact factor of 1.778. There I found the paper More Network Conscious Than Ever? Challenges, Strategies, and Analytic Labour in the Facebook Environment by N. Karakayali and A. Kilic (2013). In the paper the authors describe a new concept, analytic labour, and summarizes their study using this concept. The study they conducted was based on 36 semistructured interviews with Facebook users, with eight broad questions concerning how the interviewee uses Facebook and how he or she is thinking about it.

The semi-structured interviews are probably a good choice in this case, as it means the relatively large amount of interviews will touch on roughly the same areas and makes it easier for the researchers to compare different interviews. As the study focuses on how the users are thinking when using Facebook, and the concepts the researchers are studying is very new, the interview format is really important. It is even mentioned in the study that in their pilot interviews the researchers discovered user behaviour they had not thought about, and changed their study accordingly. Had the researchers used another method than a semistructured interview, it is possible they would have missed that behaviour entirely.

Something I learnt from reading this paper that I hadn’t actually considered before was the challenge of finding informants to interview for a study as this. Finding people interview, answer surveys or participate in other types of studies is a challenge I have faced in several courses during my studies, but somehow I have always thought of it as a problem that vanishes when you are a “real” researcher. In this paper the authors uses informants recruited from second-degree contacts, that is friends or acquaintances of people they know. At first I thought that would badly affect the quality of the study, but the researchers notes that for them to get meaningful results the interviewee have to trust the interviewer and this can be difficult if the informants are recruited randomly.

One issue I can see in the study is that out of the 36 people interviewed, 16 were students. While the use of is quite understandable, (they usually hang around universities anyway), it could possibly affect the conclusions drawn from the study if the researchers was not careful.

Finally, as the study was concerned with Facebook usage it could be interesting to further investigate the subject with some kind of observational study, even if that would be practically very challenging.

After theme 5

In this course, I find this reflecting posts quite interesting. Some weeks I feel like I have a lot of things I want to say, other weeks I don’t feel I have anything to say that has not already been mentioned in a lecture. This week is a first however, as I feel more confused about the theme now than before studying it. This probably has to do, at least in part, with the fact that I have been focusing a lot of my attention to the other course I’m taking, Future of Media, as we have our final presentation today, (thursday).

One thing I hadn’t really considered while preparing for this week, was that the act of designing can be research in itself, which was the case with actDresses. I believe that realization was quite important for me as I notice thinking about research as only evaluation can be a bit limiting. I notice however that research through design poses its own set of challenges. I am not sure if it’s due to the nature of the research or my own inexperience with reading design research, but when reading the paper on actDresses I remember I had trouble finding any definite conclusions or a clear message to take away.

One other very interesting and thought provoking thing I learnt, (or re-learnt), this week was the importance of knowing and keeping statistical methods fresh in your memory. Haibo Li dedicated a segment of his lecture on the useage of ANOVA, analysis of variance, as a tool for researchers to prove that a study has shown some significant results. I have studied probability theory and statistics, but that was a few years ago and it was a bit frightening to realize how much I had forgotten. From his lecture, I learnt that understanding statistics, and knowing how statistical measurements work is very important for me, not only as I will soon write my masters thesis, but also just to be able to correctly understand and evaluate many scientific papers.

Theme 5: Design research

The theme of this week is design research, which I found extra interesting because unlike the other weeks, I didn’t really understand what that meant before reading the papers.

This week I begun by reading the paper Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration by Réhman et al (2008).

In the paper the researchers constructs a prototype and evaluates it by observing test subjects while they use the prototype. At first, what I found the most interesting was the researchers obsession with mobile battery time. After about half the paper, I remembered to go back and check the publication date and suddenly everything started making much more sense. I find it a good reminder of how fast things can change in the field of media technology.

So, as far as I can tell, design research usually involves creating a prototype, and then using the prototype for testing. It allows researchers to try their idéas in a relatively cheap and fast way and get an idea of what is achievable and identify where problems may lie. If we wouldn’t do prototypes, and developed complete products and systems straight away, we would waste a lot of time and money and still risk that the system is too complex to draw any strong conclusions from testing.

I believe this is a very good way to do a lot of research in media technology. In my own experience, media technology can be very much about things. Things and systems. I think a lot of research in this field would be very hypothetical and abstract if we didn’t do prototypes and design research.

The paper Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses by Fernaeus and Jacobsson, (2009), continues on the theme of design research. The paper describes some prototypes that was created,  but unlike Turn your mobile into the ball this paper doesn’t give much detail on how the prototypes were developed or evaluated.

I would like to ask Ylva Fernaeus about the relationship between creating prototypes and making research generalisable. My assumption is that the more specific and developed a prototype is, the harder it would be to draw broad conclusions, but it would be interesting to hear her perspective on this.

After theme 4

I had already used both quantitative and qualitative methods before beginning this course, most recently when I did my bachelor thesis and I thought I had a pretty good grip on it. I was not wrong, but this week has taught me that there is so much more to think about and learn.

I managed to catch both seminars, and it was very rewarding. Olle Bälter’s seminar in particular helped me really think of which situations different methods should be used, and what advantages quantitative methods has over qualitative and vice versa. A lot of these thing weren’t really news, but other things had escaped me, for example: it is hard to say whether online surveys or paper based has the most climate influence, that quantitative methods may be easier to pilot test etc..

I also found the mapping we did in Stefan Hrastinski’s seminar very difficult. I had never really looked at a paper in that way, extracting variables and visibly mapping out connections, but it could be a good way to really understand a certain study.

Maybe the biggest thing I take away from this week is that quantitative and qualitative methods are best used as complements to each other, and while I’ve already used and talked both types of methods, there is so much science behind the selection of methods and so much I’ve yet to learn.

Theme 4: Quantitative research

This week I decided to begin by reading the paper Physical activity, stress, and self-reported upper respiratory tract infection by Fondell et al. Hereafter I will refer to upper respiratory tract infection as URTI. As we see in the paper quantitative methods like online surveys can be an extremely effective tool, as it allows researchers to draw conclusions from very large amounts of data. Using qualitative methods it is almost impossible to reach generalized conclusions that can be applied to the whole population or a larger group. However, in the paper some of the weaknesses of quantitative methods also become apparent. For example, there is no way for the researchers to verify the information submitted is correct. In the conclusions we don’t see a statement about URTI, but rather about self-reported URTI. Also, the researchers are unable to find more detailed information that the respondents can’t be expected to know themselves, in this instance the researchers couldn’t know for sure if a respondent had influenza or a common cold.

Keeping this in mind I went to read the research paper I chose: Measuring Mobile Phone Use: Self-Report Versus Log Data, by J. Boase and R. Ling. It was published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication with an impact factor of 1.778. I was happily surprised that the paper attempts to answer some of the questions I had when reading the paper on URTI, namely the reliability of larger surveys. The aim of the study is to compare self-reported data about mobile phone use to server logs supplied by a network operator. The quantitative methods used are an internet based survey done in Norway in 2008 and analysis of the phone log data of 613 respondents who authorized it when answering the survey. The researchers then compare the responses of the survey to the average phone usage pulled from the logs and calculates the correlation between the numbers. The advantage of using quantitative methods in this instance, apart from the researchers pronounced objective to evaluate and compare quantitative methods, is that the the researchers are able to draw much broader conclusions than they would if they had done a qualitative study on a smaller sample group.

I found the results of the study very interesting, as the researchers conclude that the self-reported data only correlate moderately with server log data. They also found that asking respondents to estimate “how often” they use their phones gave more accurate responses than asking how much they used their phone “yesterday”. The yesterday-question was something I reflected on while first reading it. My first thought was that it would not produce very good results, as, at least for me, the amount I use my phone varies heavily from day to day. Since it would be compared to the monthly average pulled from phone logs I figured there was bound to be deviations. On the other hand, I would have a hard time correctly estimating how much I use my phone on average so I found it interesting that that question still produced the best results. What I take away from this study is that what questions you ask, especially when it comes to surveys and self-reporting, heavily affects the quality and accuracy of your data.