Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

PART 1:

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

I have read the article The Relation Between Television Exposure and Theory of Mind Among Preschoolers. The aim of the study was to investigate if the exposure of television affects the results of Theory of Mind (ToM) testing. ToM is a phenomenon that develops during early years and is achieved when the children understand the mental states like thoughts, intentions, desires and emotions. The development of the children reflects their understanding that actions are individual, and that not everyone has the same point of reference as they do.

The qualitative method used in this paper was individual interviews. One trained person interview the 107 children participating in this study, by using a 7-task assessment of ToM. All of the 7 tasks used some kind of visual or pictorial object and the children had to answer questions about a character’s behavior or mental state and also a control question designed in the same way but targeting reality. For example when they tested Diverse beliefs, they showed the child a toy figure, a girl, and drawings of a garage and bushes. The toy girl, they named Linda and the interviewer told the child that Linda was looking for her missing cat and that it was probably in the bushes or the garage. The first question the child had to answer was: “Where do you think the cat is? In the bushes or in the garage?” The child got the response that the answer was good but that Linda believes her cat is in the (opposite place). Then the child had to answer where they think Linda would look for her cat and if the answer was the opposite from the first answer then it was marked as correct. The same types of scenarios were repeated in the six following tasks.

One of the benefits is that the participant being interviewed alone, can’t be influenced by other participants and therefore answer pretty honestly. I can be intimidating being interviewed in a larger group and in individual interviews the participant get all the attention and total focus all the time. One limitation is the time, it takes more time to have individual interviews, than for example, focus groups.

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

I learned that you need to be very specific when you are interviewing children since it might be difficult for them to interpret certain questions. The approach is different since it might be hard to have the same time span interviewing children as adults. The interviews in the paper were approximately 15 minutes and afterwards the children received gifts, like a notebook and a pen as a reward. I have never interviewed children so therefore I think this study was interesting.

3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

I think the main methodological problem was that you had to really make the children understand the tasks they were given. Also it was important not to influence the children in any way, they had to really think for themselves and try to figure out an answer.


PART 2:

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

A case study is a kind of research strategy, which focuses on investigating phenomenon on a deeper level. Often when case studies are being used they include both data collection, like interviews, questionnaires, and observations. There can be different goals to achieve while using case studies, for example to provide a description or test a theory.

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.

I have chosen the paper The Presence of Hyperlinks on Social Network Sites: A Case Study of Cyworld in Korea, which investigates how hyperlinks are being used in social networks (Cyworld in this case) when users are posting comments. Hyperlinks are used to connect users to for example events, political agendas or video links (like YouTube).

The strengths of the paper are that the getting started part is very clear; the scholars state the question/problem in the beginning. Another next step Enfolding Literature is also a strength since they use literature that contradicts their question but use it to build the arguments and make them stronger. The study used one sort of data collection; they developed a software program to query the social network, Cyworld, and therefore gained the comments being made by users. According to Table 1, this is the third step Crafting Instruments and Protocols and should consist of multiple data collection methods. The fact that they used only one method implies a weakness in the study and also the lack of any qualitative study like Table 1 also mentions. These were the major strengths and weaknesses I discovered while reading the paper.


References:

Sams, J. & Park, Woo H. (2013) The Presence of Hyperlinks on Social Network Sites: A Case Study of Cyworld in Korea. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Online.


Nathanson, Amy I. ; Sharp, Molly L. ; Aladé, F ; Rasmussen, Eric E. ; Christy, K. (2013) The Relation Between Television Exposure and Theory of Mind Among Preschoolers.
Journal of Communication, 2013, Vol.63, pp.1088-1108