Final Reflections

 

During the course I’ve reached a deeper understanding of the concept of theory and method. The historical journey that started out with Plato in the greek empire and ended with the frankfurter school and Adorno & Horkheimer was very useful to gain an understanding of how the concepts of knowledge and view on society has changed the concepts. This chronological ladder has helped me understand the origins of theory and method and how the use of them has changed.

One thing that I will bear with me is the words of Plato “that we don’t see with our eyes we see through them” combined with Kant’s worldview and his faculties of knowledge and “the think itself”. This will actually have an impact on how I further look upon the world and science and I’m really glad that I got the chance to read it because I don’t think I would have stumbled upon it on my own.

The course further brought up numerous terms connected with theory and method. The most useful that I’ve learned more about is the oppositional word pairs: rationalism vs. empiricism, realism vs. nominalism and deduction vs. induction. These terms I’ve heard before but I hadn’t fully understood them. They are more described in context of the course in one of my blog posts.

I the middle of the course we had the workshop given by Olle Bälter that centered around, how to conduct a good survey. In small groups we discussed the strengths and weaknesses of web questionnaires and paper and in which contexts they hade the most potential. Olle who had a lot of both theoretical and practical experience from the field also shared his best tips of how to get as many and as qualitative answers as possible. This was a great part of the course as it gave some practical tips that felt easy to grasp after weeks of abstract philosophy. I will defiantly use the tips from Olle when I design my next questionnaire. More the tips and what I thought was the best parts of the workshop can be found in the blog.

In the workshop we also discussed the pros and cons of qualitative and quantitative methods which was the next block of the course I would argue, the first being more philosophical and centered around history and deconstruction of theory.

This block focused on three main methods I would say: quantitative, qualitative and case studies. In the next three seminars we read a scientific paper that used the current method in the research. From the quantitative paper I read I learned that there is a possibility of doing a quantitative study without gathering any information on your own. The data in my paper was extracted from an earlier larger survey on and adjacent topic and then compiled to the question posed by the scientists. This was a very modern and interesting way of doing a qualitative study I believe. More on this in the blog. However I will now focus more on the main topic of this post.

Combining research methods

After reading my chosen research papers and participating in the seminar discussions I’ve realized some new ways of combining research methods that I didn’t know before.

By starting out with a qualitative study and an inductive approach analysis can create very interesting hypothesizes that can be further investigated and validated by quantitative and deductive methods. For example interesting thoughts about a process can be extracted from an interview that you didn’t know existed and then an questionnaire can be designed to confirm or deny if this is projectable on a larger scale.

One other way of combing methods can be done by starting out with a quantitative study that gather some type of measurable data. After the study however new findings might be hard to understand and a qualitative follow up study can be designed to extract causality behind the results. This gives more understanding and deeper insight to the number when presented.

Both of these methods can be used when doing a case study. In a case study a complex process or social relation is investigated that often is hard to distinguish from the context. In a case study multiple data gathering methods is often used along side different methodologies to understand the causation.

The combination of research methods is the best way to produce a more credible and multidimensional result. The combination of different methods compliments each other at times, but also contradicts each other. This balances each method out and gives in the end a hopefully truer and richer account, which derives on the strengths of each method while blocking out the weaknesses.

One practice of using combined methods is called triangulation. Triangulation is a powerful technique that facilitates validation of data through cross verification from two or more sources and can for example include the following practical parts: Analytics, interviews, cultural probe, focus groups, quantitative survey and usability testing. These give a lot of different views and lots of data. The key is to use the appropriate methods for each research project and also carry out the method correct even if it’s used along side another method.

My conclusion is that there is a lot of possible methods to chose from when performing a scientific research and one should really think about the type of results that is desired when choosing one or more methods. Combining methods is a great way of gathering a large quantity of data with great richness and is good when facing very complex tasks but requires a lot of time and analytics.

Thanks for this course and thanks for reading my blog.

August Ejnarsson