Theme 6 – Qualitative and case study research

For this week’s theme I have chosen to read the qualitative paper Perceived Connections Between Information and Communication Technology Use and Mental Symptoms Among Young Adults – A Qualitative Study by Sara Thomée, Lotta Dellve, Annika Härenstam and Mats Hagberg.

1. Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
   This paper used individual semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions performed by the main author. The questions were about the participant’s connection between the use of computer and mobile phones, and stress, depression and sleep disturbances. They also asked direct questions about the participants’ own worries about personal ICT use, their experiences of problematic or destructive ICT use and the impact of ICT use on their sleep.
   
   A benefit with this method is that the participant can come up with new ideas that the interviewer hasn’t thought about. Since a semi-structured interview gives more freedom in the answers than a structured interview I think that one can get better answers.
   A limitation with a semi-structured interview is that there is a chance that the answers goes outside the actual topic. If the interviewer doesn’t have a specific path to go with the questions there is a chance that the interview does not contribute to the research because it is not enough answers.
   
   
2. What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
   I am not sure that I learned so much about qualitative studies by reading the paper since we talked a lot about qualitative studies during the seminar with Olle. But it was nice to put a qualitative study in to context and actually see how it can be used.
   
   
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
   I believe that they could have combined the semi-structured interview with a structured interview. Because that could reduce the risk of answers going too much off topic. A structured interview would keep the answers within the topic and that could be complemented with more open-ended questions in form of a semi-structured interview.

For the case study I chose the paper Social Media Competitive Analysis and Text Mining: A Case Study in the Pizza Industry by Wu He, Shengua Za and Ling Li.

4. Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
   A case study is an analysis of a person, group or event. The analysis could be either descriptive, exploratory or explanatory. A case study often uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods but also empirical and theoretical. The case study could be either prospective or retrospective. A prospective case study is a study where criteria are established and the cases that fit the criteria are included as they become available. A retrospective case study is a study where criteria are established for cases that are selected from historical records for inclusion in the study.
   
   
5. 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.
   One good thing with this study is that they define the research questions and target group early in the text, they have three research questions to be answered. The case is done on the three largest pizza chains: Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza and Papa John’s Pizza. They explain very good, and early, in the text why they have chosen the pizzaindustry which makes it easy to understand that it is not chosen randomly.
   
   They used multiple data collection methods. They used a quantitative method which looked at the social media sites for each pizza chain, for example how many followers, likes, shares, comments, number of posts and frequency of posting. Then they used text mining to analyze the text messages and in order to discover new patterns and knowledge.
   
   I am not sure that I could find any comparison with conflicting literature and overlapping data collection. They also use only three cases and according to the text by Eisenhart it is best to have 4-10 cases. So maybe they could have used more cases to make the study more reliable.