Final post and comments

Final post

Comments:

http://jennybern.blogspot.se/2014/10/theme-6-qualitative-and-case-study.html?showComment=1414669525513#c8116028970436978080 (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/10/theme-6-qualitative-and-case-study.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/10/theme-5-design-research-pre-seminar.html(1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/10/theme-5-design-research-post.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/theme-4-quantitative-research-pre.html (2 comments)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/10/theme-4-quantitative-research-post.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/theme-3-research-and-theory-pre-seminar.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/theme-2-critical-media-studies-pre.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/theme-2-critical-media-studies-post.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/theme-1-theory-of-knowledge-and-theory.html (1 comment)

http://martsodm2572.blogspot.com/2014/09/heme-1-theory-of-knowledge-and-theory.html (1 comment)

In total: 11 comments

Reflection:

I commented mostly on my own blog posts. At first I did not plan to comment on anything. But I felt like I had to respond to the comments other people gave on my blog with somewhat good answers.

When this course first started I was a little skeptic about the content of the course. I though the course was going to be about research in media technology and but the lectures were about philosophy. While I think philosophy is interesting I doubted the real world implications what we learnt would have. In my first blog postings I tried stated that I least learnt some English reading comprehension.  I realize now that the facts that I learned during the first lectures was not the important, the important thing is the way of thinking with criticism and not take everything for granted or what other people say they are, I should think for myself basically.

I very much like the layout of this course. With requirements and tasks to do both before and after the lecture it ensures that both that the student will come well prepared to the lectures and seminars, but also pay attention to the lectures and reflect on things as they happened rather than perhaps waiting until the exam is closing in to start paying attention. I like how the seminars were like a recap on what we learned during the week, hearing some of what you learnt again, as well as clearing out thing that was unclear I believe will result in students remembering the topics better and also help laying the whole puzzle so to speak, once you understand what the whole puzzle looks like it is easier to remember the picture.

I like how we got to choose for ourselves what we wanted to read before the seminars. I can see that it can lead to difficulties discussing too many different researches on one seminar, but with the blogs and all this turned out to work out well. As we got to choose the topics for ourselves I believe that the students puts more effort into the tasks related to them as they find the topics more exiting (one is likely to choose a research they think will be interesting to read).

I also liked the workshops were the students were divided into small subgroups to compete against each other. This was very exciting and I believe if the seminars are exiting people will learn more.

I think the course should have focused more on actual research studies during the lectures. It would be nice if along with presenting the methods some done research was presented to illustrate how they made the method conform to their study. Eva-Lotta had a lecture like this where she focused a lot on her own studies. While I think this was interesting I had unfortunately already read her course in haptic and were familiar to all the researches she presented. It would also be nice if the course focused more on not only what research methods are available but also how one should think when performing a study of their own and choosing to work with some of these methods. I know it might not be in the span of this course but I would like to learn more about how one performs an actual study. Perhaps something I will learn in a future course, at least I have knowledge about the basic methodology.

Combining everything we learnt about ways of critically thinking with the knowledge about research methods and the experience of reading different media technology research studies I learned a lot in this course. Depending on what you are investigating a different approach will always be used, different methods and different ways of thinking will be used.  

In Haibos lecture we learnt that one should spend a lot of time thinking about the problem. In the case of research studies this can mean; what do we want to get out of the study or what do we want to investigate? It is first after you thought about those questions you can start planning how the actual research will be conducted, what methods will be used and so on.

For example when doing something simple like investigating how users feel about this new application to Android one can have many methods and different questions to be answered. Is it vital that we know how users interact with the application? Is it the functionality of the application that we want to test? Do we want to investigate whether this new function is going to be useful for some groups of people? Questions like these needs to be answered beforehand in order to begin planning on what research method we want to use to get answers to our questions. Perhaps a user evaluation with several participants might be handy, or perhaps a beta test. Perhaps it is only necessary to study other similar applications and critique about these. Perhaps we need to investigate how useful some of these functions are in order to tune down the messy layout by removing some of them.

I feel like i will bring a lot of the knowledge I gained in this course to my future investigations. I have not done my bachelor thesis yet but I will most likely do a research on eye tracking in games. I will remember what I learnt during this course and use it to improve my research

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research (Post seminar)

During Haibos lecture this week i learned that to solve a problem you need not only to focus on solving a specific problem, you need to think about if the problem can be seen from a different view making it perhaps easier to solve or more interesting. He showed us a clip from Johnny English where Johnny chased a more agile crook up on a building. Instead of jumping over the obstacles in a fancy kung fu style Johnny simply walked around them. I believe that this is not only the way the lazy engineer does it but this way will help you save time and focus your effort to do your company good or even solve problems that at first seemed unsolvable.

On the seminar we discussed what a case study is. To be honest I am still not sure what a case study really is. I mean, I know the definition of a case study but it is very hard to tell which study is a case study, why it is a case study and why it is not. I am not sure my selected paper is a case study, there were a case (2010 UK General election) and the area of investigation was quite general (to investigate how social media monitoring allows for analysis of social dynamics. The thing I learned was that a case study is does not have well defined problems and hypothesis, you investigate a case for the purpose of getting further insights and the case and maybe learn something from it. I believe my paper was a case study having learnt this.

Theme 5: Design research (Post)

Theme 5: Design research

This week we were supposed to have two lectures, and we had no seminar this week. One lecture got moved to the week after so I have not been to it the moment I write this. The first lecture was held by Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander and was mostly about haptic collaborative research. I had already read Eva-Lottas course in haptics so I was already familiar with the research she talked about so unfortunately I did not learn much. She talked a little about how you can combine quantitative and qualitative methods to get the best possible output. This was kinda new to me even though I had reflected on it earlier by reading the texts.

I was also familiar with all the 3 papers we were supposed to read. We went through many haptical research projects in the haptics course before we did our own project. I guess it was useful to read the text from more of a design research perspective rather than a haptical (technological) perspective. I got a lot of insight how a research can be conducted.

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research (pre seminar)

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

I choose to read the paper “Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

Social Media Analysis and Public Opinion: The

2010 UK General Election” by Nick Anstead and Ben O'Loughlin which I found in the journal of computer-mediated communication. The goal of the study is to investigate how social media monitoring allow for analysis of social dynamics through which opinions form and shift, for example how peoples opinion changes during a election campaign. The study as a whole consists of both qualitative and quantitative studies. The study contained a quantitative analysis of social media data, that could for example be how many times the name “Jimmie Åkesson” occurred on twitter the last hour during his speech.

The study also consists of several qualitative semi-structured interviews of of people different skills in the area of investigation. For example pollsters, social media researchers and journalists. The purpose of the interviews was to get information about the link between social media and public opinion. They use the interviews and also some qualitative content analysis of some papers along with the interviews to define what is the meaning of public opinion, how will we define it, an how can we include the social aspects into the definition.

The benefits of using these kind of qualitative and semi structured interviews is first of all that you are very likely to get good quality data, because the participants all have great knowledge of the questions asked and are likely to give in dept answers. The cost of conducting these interviews are probably low because of the few correspondents. On the other hand when you interview this few people the results obtained is heavily dependent on the single person giving the answer. You cannot interview one social media researcher and make that person represent every researcher, that single persons vision can be different from others and therefore you cannot take what that person says as fact. This is a possible flaw in my chosen paper but I believe that the thorough discussion made it clear how to interpret the concept of public opinion as the sum of discrete preferences.

From reading this paper I learned one way to take advantage of both the qualitative and the quantitative methods in a research. I can see how the qualitative methods are used to obtain information in order to define concepts and gain a wide knowledge of the research area, this was used to define how the quantitative methods were constructed. Then qualitative methods are used to analyze large amounts of data and formulate results and proof aswell as backing up the information obtained in the interviews.

1.  Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.

It is a method of research with the purpose of doing an in dept analysis of a event of phenomena where you focus on a single or several cases, events or scenarios and analyzing them in dept. It is a qualitative study where you use a few cases to perhaps test or formulate a new hypothesis. The methology can consist of various methods, for example interviews, observation or reading literature with content analysis.

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.

At the start of the research the research questions was not properly defined. They wanted to see what conclusions could be made by monitoring social media flows about matters such as public opinion and social dynamics. They did not really know how to define some of the concepts such a s public opinion so they had to do some research in order to know how the investigation should be done. They were using multiple data collecting methods, both quantitative collections from social media network flows and qualitative interviews were the selected correspondent consisted of people who the researchers beforehand saw as knowledgeable people in the area of investigation. Because that they used both quantitative collections of data as well as interviews (multiple data collection methods) I would say they had a sufficient amount of overlapping data which made proof of the same hypothesis. They did also used a lot of enfolding literature in order to define concepts and back up some of the information gathered from the interviews.

Theme 4: Quantitative research (post seminar)

This week we had a ”workshop” instead of a seminar.  During the workshop we split up in smaller groups to compete against each other in discussing topics like advantages and disadvantages of qualitative and quantivative studies. I think this workshop/seminar were the most exiting of all because I felt like I could contribute a lot to the workshop by the means of helping my group. The competition got quite fierce and I like that.

Some of the think I learnt is the benefits and limitations of quantitative and qualitative studies. The conclusions of the workshop were very similar to my own conclusions and research on this topic. I also learned how to combine the both methods in order to make a research. You can use qualitative studies to gain insight on a topic in order to formulate a hypothesis and the quantitative study to test and prove the hypothesis.

During the workshop I also learned advantages and disadvantages of web survey vs. paper forms. Web surveys has easier and faster distribution and are cheaper for large amount of participants though web surveys might have larger dropout rate (in some cases, but can be avoided) and it might be hard to reach some groups (for example old people). Paper surveys on the other hand has low initial cost but high distributional cost for large populations, paper surveys also has some psychological advantages that makes people more willing to answer them thoroughly.

Before the workshop I read the paper “Physical activity, stress, and self-reported upper respiratory tract infection” and reflected on the limitations and benefits of quantivative/qualitative studies. I also read “Social Networking Sites: Their Users and Social Implications — A Longitudinal Study ” by Petter Bae Brandtzæg. I investigated the research methods used in the study and proposed some improvements as well as giving critique to their methods.

Theme 5: Design research (pre seminar)

Theme 5: Design research

Reflection part 1

When designing media technologies, especially previously unexplored technologies such as the hapics used in the paper “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” by Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008) I believe several steps are necessary in order to come up with a good concept of the product or program. As a first step you obviously need some product idea with theoretical support of why this product might be a good idea to invest into. In the case of this paper the idea was quite wild but backed up with the theoretic explaining that the vibrotactile sense could harvest a lot of information.

A later step is to evaluate whether this product actually is useful or not. In the case of the paper I believe it is useful to design a prototype to test the basic mechanics of the product, in this case if the vibrotactile sense could be used to follow the football game or if it was too complicated, distracting etc. If the technology is quite unexplored I feel like a designing a prototype followed up by user tests and evaluations might be a good idea. If the potential of the technology already is explored this might be an unnecessary cost, for example if one were to develop a faster computer or a screen with more colors.

The potentials with designing a prototype are that you can test you hypothesis in a non-theoretical environment. You can use user evaluations to gain knowledge about the topic and to prove theoretical concepts. A prototype can be demonstrated to the public in order to gain attention and trust towards your product.. There are different kinds of prototypes high and low fidelity prototypes. A low fidelity prototype might be used to illustrate a concept, while to evaluate something more carefully a high fidelity prototype might be more useful. The downsides of developing a prototype are obviously that it is costly and time consuming, and if the prototype turned out to be a failure, or if dramatic changes had to be done to it the investment might have been for nothing. If you use a low fidelity prototype the costs might decrease dramatically and it might be worth making a prototype for the case of illustration. You can gain knowledge about what works and what does not by developing a prototype, but it might be big investment.

Reflection part 2

How does a collaborative setting differ from a single user setting as regards methodology used and the results obtained?

During a collaborative setting users can communicate with each other. A problem with collaborative studies could be that users interfere and affect each other, that could both be problematic ( if some thought get held back or affected by for example group pressure) and positive (participants might stimulate each other to get more well thought off answers. We can example of a collaborative study in Sallnäs text  "A haptic tool for group work about geometrical concepts engaging blind and sighted pupils" we see example of a collaborative study where visually impaired and blindfolded people work together with sighted people to perform tasks. The result might be harder to analyze in collaborative environments as more variables have to be taken into account for.

How can qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study complement each other?

One thing I learned in the seminar last week was that qualitative studies can be used to gain further insight on a previously (relatively) unexplored topic. The qualitative study can be used to formulate hypothesis and the hypothesis can be used to formulate good questions that might be suitable in a quantitative study. The quantitative study is then used to confirm and prove the hypothesis in order to form a complete study.

How can using both subjective and objective methods give a better understanding of a phenomenon?

I believe that subjective and objective methods can give different perspectives on a topic as well as complement each other. Feelings, for example, is a subjective measure. To investigate how people feels after being treated by something one might use both subjective and objective methods to analyze. You cannot definitely say that “to fix a tooth hurts” as the result of someone saying that is subjective, and not objective. Nevertheless objective methods can be used to compile data gathered by subjective methods. If a large enough percentage says that to fix a tooth hurts a lot one might consider usage of narcotics to lessen the pain as a standard procedure.

Theme 3: Research and theory (Post seminar)

Theme 3: Research and theory 

This week has been a lot more interesting to me because this week you got to choose what you wanted to read and there were many exiting papers to choose from. I guess what i will remember best after this week is how a research paper can be done and I will keep the things I learnt in mind for when I will do a similar investigation of my own. I learn to criticize the methods of the investigation as well as some of the results.

 I also learnt what research and theory is. During the lecture Leif talked about the difference between practical and theoretical knowledge. He also said that theory is a way of describing how phenomena work for the purpose of explaining. Leif gave an example of the theory of man. Man can be a biological creature (medicine), spiritual being (religion), or a social and political animal. We also learnt that theory is different from hypothesis. A theory provides a framework for explanation regarding some observation, and from the assumptions of the explanation we can have a number of possible hypotheses that can be tested in order to prove or disprove the theory.

Unfortunately I could not attend to the seminar this week due to sickness, so I guess I did not contribute much to that. From what I've heard you split into small groups and talked about theory and hypothesis regarding the research paper.

I feel the trend of this course is that things get easier and easier to understand.  The first two themes (especially the first one) were very abstract and really hard to understand. Now we actually got to read a research paper providing an explanation of some very common thoughts about real practical problems and not just theoretical problems.