The qualitative method that is used in the paper was open-text boxes. The benefits is the diversified set of answers that will be given. It also gives room for participants to give a deeper explanation and room to elaborate their answers. Limitations of using open-text boxes is that it can result in invalid answers and it is more demanding for the participants to answer.
If I would use qualitative methods I would probably chose to have a focus group or interviews because it feels like it would give a more in-depth result. But after reading this paper is realized the power and value of open-text boxes, interesting!
It would be interesting to also have interviews or focus groups to achieve a deeper understanding on why they adopt different personas when they move between different environments. Also could participants withheld personal information since they have to write it down.
In preparation to answer the following questions I read the paper Building Theories from Case Study Research by Eisenhard. I also selected the paper Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry by He, W., Zha, S. & Li, L.
Eisenhardt refers in his paper Building Theories from Case Study Research to Yin who defines Case study as ”a research strategy, developed a typology of case study designs, and described the replication logic which is essential to multiple cases analysis.” A case study can include single or multiple cases and several levels of analysis. Case studies can be used to achieve thing as test theory, generate theory or provide description. So simple said a case study is an in-depth study of a particular situation which will generate an indication, not a direct answer.
My selected media technology research paper that is using the case study research method is; Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry by He, W., Zha, S. & Li, L. (2013). My chosen research paper can be find in International Journal of Information Management, with an impact factor of 2.243. The Case study applies text mining to analyze unstructured text content on Twitter and Facebook for three large pizza chains; Pizza Hut, Domino's Pizza and Papa John's Pizza. The Research question is; What patterns can be found from their Facebook sites respectively? What patterns can be found from their Twitter sites respectively? What are the main differences in terms of their Facebook and Twitter patterns? A strength of the case study (judging from table one) is its relevance. It is clarified that restaurant industry draws minimal attention in IT and that the Pizza industry in USA is one of the first industries to be seen on social media for business purposes. It also has multiple data collections with multiple investigators. A possible weakness is that they focusing on two social media (Facebook and Twitter) which has different purpose and is being used differently, therefore can the outcome be wrongly read.
Nice evaluation of the definition of a case study. One point I think is crucial to case studies is that you evaluate and examine cases that occured in the past, and you examine it to either investigate the phenomena itself, or you investigate it to study a certain behaviour.
SvaraRaderaInteresting realization about open-text boxes. When i think of qualitative studies i still think about in person interviews, focus groups and so on like you said. This can be an interesting way to combine both qualitative and quantitative methods on one single survey. When you want qualitative answers you try to make the respondents to the survey use their own words and evaluate through open text boxes, when you want quantitative answers you just make them check boxes on a scale. I know this is probably very obvious but i had not thought about it before.
SvaraRadera