Pre Seminar 6

Journal: New Media & Society
Impact Factor: 2.052

Paper:  Credit, time, and personality: The human challenges to sharing scholarly work using Web 2.0


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

This article is based upon analysis of qualitative interviews, observations, workshops, and textual data collected from a seven-year long project about future of scholarly communications. The interviews in the project were conducted over one- to two hours in a semi-structured way. The participants were over 160 faculty, librarians, and publishers across more than 45 ‘elite’ research institutions largely in North America (and some in Western Europe) in over 12 disciplines.

So the researcher didn't do the actual qualitative methods themselves except the analyze part but based this on a smorgasbord of qualitative research methods from another study.

The first major benefit is that they had a large pool of data to base the study on without spending any resources on the actual interviews and participation gathering. They also had a lot of different data from a alot of different methods to proceed from which gave them a lot of opportunities.

The limitaitons is that they couldn't ask the questions themselves and se the reactions and everything that goes on around the transcripts which is very important in qualitative research. They also couldn't form the questions and interview strategies exactly how they wanted. They were force to deal with the material they had, even if this was pretty extensive.

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

Different types of methods can be mixed and combined in the same paper to give more extensive data. I also realized that you could make quanlitative reaserch without conducting interviews and observations yourself, you can just take this data and analyse it if you can get it from another source.

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

They base there reaserch on a very big database of information with mixed types of qualitative methods. I can se a problem in extracting relevant information from this database especially when it's qualitative data. If it was quantitative numbers could easily be compiled and visualized by charts and graphs but this qualitiative data needs deep analytics and I see a problem in the way they handle all this big qualitative data. There is a big risk of just gathering the data that fits your purpose and ignoring the ones that arn't as good. 

To improve this study I think they should have  done the interview themselves or maybe instead of just analyzing data from a study, interviewd the interviewers to get a better picture of their understanding of the study and then analyzed that. 

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

A case study is a way of using a single or several examples of “real-life” phenomena, events or persons to analyze and consequently derive conclusions. It can be used to test a theory or generate theories in a specific industry or in society.
 
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. 

Journal: Internation Journal of Information and Managment
Paper: Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry


Short summery:

The paper perform a social media competitive analysis for the three largest pizza chains in America and to generate a theory that can help decision makers and e-marketers when managing user genrated content.

Defenition of research questions:

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?

Selecting Cases

The 3 largets pizza business in America: Pizza Hut, Domino's Pizza, Papa John's Pizza 

Crafting instrument and protocols

Text mining to analyze unstructured text content on Facebook and Twitter.

Strenghts and Weaknesses:

They make a thourough analysis of each of the three cases and compare them both on quantitative values like number of interactions and responses as well as qualitative comparations with quotes from customers and companies. This gives a good picture of how all the companies handle the social media and how they use it to create a social bond to the customers. The study is very well designed and I think it covers more and less all steps of Eisenhardts Table. One thing that I think could be improved is the step when analyzing data with the cross-case pattern search, using divergent techniques. Beyond looking at the comments on the social media platforms they could have interviewed the companies to see if they had different strategies or if the interactions occured without any deeper thoughts. This could have shed some more light on how the companies chose to work with social media. One other possible weakness is the fact they they only used the largest companies. It would've been interesting to see how smaller pizza places used social media to interacti with their customers aswell.