Theme6: Qualitative and case study research

The paper I chose:

Malin, J. B. (2011) A very popular blog: The internet and the possibilities of publicity. New Media & Society. 13(2), 187-202

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

This paper use a typical qualitative method to discuss the implication of two modes of publicity for traditional broadcast and online communications. Referring to relative literatures and previous research, the authors trace a lot of examples and compare them to analysis explain the implication of broadcast, cable television and internet.

Benefit: Qualitative methods used in the paper make a good combination between statistics from research institutions or media companies and relative theoretical literatures. As the discussion is based on a large amount of examples from previous research, they analysis by comparing the examples to get most reliable conclusion. In addition, without the processing of collecting data, the method is less complex because it concentrates on a representative sample(US).

Limitation：The main content is using previous study to analysis and give explanation of the implication, while the general conclusion is not objective enough and probably influenced by researcher and method from reference. A research without data supported lack of accuracy.

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

Compared with quantitative method, qualitative method describes and explain the object based on general theories and a great amount of history and examples. Comparison and logical analyzing are the main ways to do qualitative research and the opinions from author significantly influenced the conclusion. It aims to explain social phenomenon.

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

Although the topics of the paper is implication of publicity of traditional medium(broadcast and television) and internet, the reflection is in terms of humans. While the research do not apply an quantitative method that means no data collection and statistics verify the conclusion. Taking a survey of a large number of participants to focus on their opinions about two modes of publicity, then the study can result from the collected data to verify the reliability of previous conclusion.

Selected paper:

Nicole B. Ellison et al (2007) The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Volume 12, Issue 4, July 2007, Pages: 1143–1168

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

Case study is one solution to build theory. The case study is a research strategy which focuses on understanding the dynamics present within single settings. case studies can be used to accomplish various aims: to provide description, test theory and generate theory. Case study is a typical combination of qualitative research and quantitative research such as interviews, questionnaires and observations.

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.

According to the structure of building theory from case study research, selected paper definitely match  the whole system. In terms of cross-case search for patterns, the paper used all the tactics recommended to sort and analysis the data, multiples lenses about result for social capital items are showed. The conclusion based on empirical data analysis is a excellent ends regarded as reaching closure.

On the other hand, the sample participants of the investigation are completely undergraduate students and even from the same university, it seems do not correspond to multiple investigators. In addition, less comparison with other literature , no matter similarity or conflict appears in the discussion.