1. Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
The qualitative method of this paper was "open-ended in-depth face-to-face interviews" with eight of the respondents from an earlier quantitative online survey. "The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed through a combination of qualitative content analysis, typological reduction analysis, and hermeneutical/rhetorical interpretation."
The benefits of an open-ended interview is that the respondents might get into subjects that you as a researcher never would have thought about asking and therefore you gain new interesting answers. It can also be limiting if the respondents get to far away from your main questions, but that is also your responsibility as the interviewer to control. Face-to-face is beneficial in a way that you can see the respondents facial expressions and body language which helps with the conversation. It's easier to misunderstand each other without the face-to-face interaction in a dialogue.
2. What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
I haven't thought so much about how to pick which respondents to conduct the interviews before. I think we only took some when doing our bachelor essay. I realize now that it might not have been so good. When looking for qualitative and topically relevant answers it's better to chose respondents that has good answers and not do a random select.
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
Methodological problems include concerns about reliability, validity and dependability of data, results, conclusions and generalizations in a research enterprise. I think this study is a quite generalize one and they get the answers they seem to be searching for and thus I think that there aren't any great problems. I think it's good that they are using both quantitative and qualitative methods in the study and I don't know how they should have used the qualitative methods in other ways. They did a good job, confirmed what others also had found and the workload seemed reasonable.
Part 2:
For part 2 I chose the paper "Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry" with an impact factor 2.042
1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
In my own words I would say that a case study is often when you observe people doing a task in real life for you to gain knowledge about some explicit part of the task.
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.
They are defining the research questions and the target group early in the case which is good. They have chosen the three largest US Pizza chains (Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza and Papa John’s Pizza) and show arguments for why this industry is relevant to do the case around so it's not only "random sampling", and then they specify three research questions to answer.
They also used methods for multiple data collection. They looked at quantitative data about the Pizza chains from their social medias (such as #followers, #likes, #shares, #postings...) and then applied different text mining analysis on the text messages. I think they also do well during the "Analyzing data" and they do both within-case analysis and cross-case analysis.
I couldn't find so much of shaping hypotheses or overlapping data collection and analysis during the case nor so much comparison with conflicting literature. They also had a "pre-defined" ending with only 3 cases but it seemed to be enough for them, although the Eisenhardt text said that it was best to have about 4-10 cases, so maybe this case research isn't as "valid" as it could have been...but I'm not sure, we can leave that as a question for the seminar!
Methodological issues: https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110310100631AAFNbNn
Case Study research: https://www.kth.se/social/course/DM2572/page/case-study-research/
Building Theories from Case Study Research: http://www.jstor.org.focus.lib.kth.se/stable/258557
Social media competitive analysis and text mining: http://www.sciencedirect.com.focus.lib.kth.se/science/article/pii/S0268401213000030
Hi,
SvaraRaderaI have also chosen same paper as you did for qualitative research method. I agree with you that the paper was really organized and used qualitative method in a good way. The only methodological problem I found is, how they narrow down participants for in-depth interviews from the large pool of participants. I think the selection was biased may be, so it loses the external validity. I have also chosen the same paper for case study as well, I would must say that you have explained the strengths and weaknesses of this paper very well. Well done !
First of all I want to say that your post is easy to read and I especially like that you have used KTH's definition of what a case study is and that you posted an image of the table that we were to look at. Seeing the table that you've used is really helpful when reading about the strengths and weaknesses of the paper.
SvaraRaderaYou seem to be of the opinion that the case study done in your second paper wasn't valid since there were only three cases. Would you say that it could be valid if the authors were to make a new research having this paper as basis and then adding one or two cases? Or would that be a way to "cheat" the validity issue?