I have chosen the paper "Facebook
and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Unintended Consequences" from the journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication with an impact factor of 2.019.
Which qualitative method or methods
are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these
methods?
The qualitative method used in this paper based on the
‘open-ended in-depth face-to-face interviews’.
In which they conducted an online survey that was administered to 119 college
undergraduates, then eight participants (two male, six female) from the
online survey respondent pool were selected for open-ended in-depth
face-to-face interviews. The selected participants received a written
explanation of the research objectives and ethics before signing a consent form.
The interviews were recorded and analyzed through a combination of qualitative
content analysis, typological reduction analysis, and rhetorical interpretation.
This type of qualitative analysis is particularly fruitful when dealing with a
novel field that is not yet structured and requires preliminary understanding.
Also as they sent written explanation to participants before interviews, so
participants will come up with some research and analysis so interviewer can
get different point of views, or interviewer might get some additional
information which can be beneficial in research. In this paper, through
qualitative analysis interviewer gain deeper insight into attitudes and behaviors
with respect to Facebook use and privacy issues, narratives related to the
relevance, attraction, and usage of Facebook, and experiences about invasion of
privacy on Facebook.
What did you learn about qualitative
methods from reading the paper?
I think the
same concept which I already have about qualitative methods. But I liked the
way as they categorized their research, first reduction of the material and the
inductive development of analytical categories from it and, in a second step,
the deductive application of categories to interpret the data. I think
in this way, you can gain deeper understanding of actual research question and
reduce the irrelevant data.
Which are the main methodological
problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods
have been improved?
It is
difficult to find methodological problems in this study, they used both
qualitative and quantitative methods very well. But the only problem I would
say, how they chose only 8 people for in-depth interviews from 119 participants.
I also think that they just conducted survey in one university so it might be
difficult to generalize or conclude the result based on 119 people of same
university.
Part 2:
I have
chosen the paper "Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in
the pizza industry" from the
‘International Journal of Information Management’.
Briefly explain to a first year
university student what a case study is.
A case study is an in depth study of a particular
situation rather than a sweeping statistical
survey. It is a method used to narrow down a very broad field of
research into one easily research-able topic. While it will not answer a
question completely, it will give some indications and allow further
elaboration and hypothesis creation
on a subject. Case studies should not be confused with qualitative research and they can be
based on any mix of quantitative and qualitative evidence.
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.
Step 1: This
study came up with three research questions in the beginning, which is plus
point according to table.
Step 2: This study examined the social media sites of the three largest pizza
chains, so yes they are not using random sampling.
Step 3: First, this study collected quantitative data manually from
their individual social media sites such as number of fans/followers, number of
postings, comments, shares and likes, frequency of posting. Secondly, applied
text mining to analyze the text messages posted on their Facebook and Twitter
sites in order to discover new knowledge and patterns, and to acquire a deeper
understanding of how the three pizza chains are using social media in practice.
So they used multiple collection methods which is strength of this study.
Step 4: I think they didn't use overlap data collection. They just
analyzed the data which they got from surveys.
Step 5: I think they didn't use cross-case pattern search, using
divergent techniques, I think they should also look for different
strategies of companies.
Step 6: This study used tabulation or
graphs to analyze the questions about each company. But they didn't shape their
research questions and not used any logic cross cases.
Step 7: They didn't compare their
study with any other study. They just compared three largest chains of pizza
which is not good. I think they should also have a look on smaller pizza’s
companies.
Step
8: Yes, I think they reached to closure very well. They came up with some
recommendations as well, such as a business can compare its social
media data to the social media data of their competitors to gain perspective on
their performance. In the end, they also came up with some future
research areas related to this case study.
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