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.