Theme 6: Qualitative and Case Study Research

Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

I have chosen the paper Coming of age with the internet: A qualitative exploration of how the internet has become an integral part of young people’s lives by McMillan and Morrison. The qualitative method they used was narrative accounts in form of autobiographical essays. 72 college students who were studying communication where asked to write about their personal histories of interactive media use.

What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?

I’ve learned that documents can be an important data source which can provide you with information that has historical insight. Interviews might give you the same information as documents but the difference is that narrative account in written form gives the user more time to reflect on their experiences.  I also learned that this type of method has been used since 1933 to study human interaction with media. 

Which are the main methodological problems of the study?

I couldn’t figure out what the main methodological problem were, but one thing I reflected on was that they only asked communication students. They might have more interest and also more experience in communication technologies than other students. I believe the result might have been slightly different if there were a broder span of students in the target group. 

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

A case study is a research method where you get deeper understanding of a subject. Often a combination of several methods for collecting data is used, such as through archive, interviews, questionnaires, and observations. The methods can both be quantitative or qualitative.

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.

The case study paper I have chosen is “All over the place”: A case study of classroom multitasking and attentional performance by Hassoun. His observations suggest that multitasking has become a  deeply ordinary practice. The method used in the research is that he acts as an undercover participant to a class where he observed as many as possible of the 200 students who were attending. Everyday he sat at different places in the classroom and tried to observe different persons, if someone payed a lot attention to their phone several days in a row he asked them after class to get an interview about their thoughts and responses toward multitasking.

I consider both of the methods to be qualitative, since he do not get any numbers. The weakness of this research is that only one person are doing the observations in the classroom. Not all of the students are acting similar, and the way Hassoun describe the behaviors does not fit all the 200 students. I believe the target group is too big for one person to observe, maybe it would have been better to use a quantitative method on those 200 students and then followed up with a smaller observation and interviews.  

McMillan, S., Morrison, M. 2006. Coming of age with the internet: A qualitative exploration of how the internet has become an integral part of young people’s lives. New Media & Society. Vol 8(1): 73–95. DOI: 10.1177/1461444806059871 

Hassoun, D. 2015. ”All over the place”: A case study of classroom multitasking and attentional prformance. New Media & Society. Vol. 17(10): 1680–1695. DOI: 10.1177/1461444814531756