So, we’re at the final week of the course. The theme is Qualitative and Case Study research. I feel like I already know much about qualitative research from doing my bachelors thesis, as it came up quite a lot when talking about quantitative research, but there’s always more to learn!
To find a good research paper using qualitative methods I went to my new favorite journal, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, with an impact factor of 1.778. There I found the paper More Network Conscious Than Ever? Challenges, Strategies, and Analytic Labour in the Facebook Environment by N. Karakayali and A. Kilic (2013). In the paper the authors describe a new concept, analytic labour, and summarizes their study using this concept. The study they conducted was based on 36 semistructured interviews with Facebook users, with eight broad questions concerning how the interviewee uses Facebook and how he or she is thinking about it.
The semi-structured interviews are probably a good choice in this case, as it means the relatively large amount of interviews will touch on roughly the same areas and makes it easier for the researchers to compare different interviews. As the study focuses on how the users are thinking when using Facebook, and the concepts the researchers are studying is very new, the interview format is really important. It is even mentioned in the study that in their pilot interviews the researchers discovered user behaviour they had not thought about, and changed their study accordingly. Had the researchers used another method than a semistructured interview, it is possible they would have missed that behaviour entirely.
Something I learnt from reading this paper that I hadn’t actually considered before was the challenge of finding informants to interview for a study as this. Finding people interview, answer surveys or participate in other types of studies is a challenge I have faced in several courses during my studies, but somehow I have always thought of it as a problem that vanishes when you are a “real” researcher. In this paper the authors uses informants recruited from second-degree contacts, that is friends or acquaintances of people they know. At first I thought that would badly affect the quality of the study, but the researchers notes that for them to get meaningful results the interviewee have to trust the interviewer and this can be difficult if the informants are recruited randomly.
One issue I can see in the study is that out of the 36 people interviewed, 16 were students. While the use of is quite understandable, (they usually hang around universities anyway), it could possibly affect the conclusions drawn from the study if the researchers was not careful.
Finally, as the study was concerned with Facebook usage it could be interesting to further investigate the subject with some kind of observational study, even if that would be practically very challenging.
Hi, Jakob!
SvaraRaderaWhen reading the part you wrote about semi structured interviews I can't ask myself what the difference between those kinds of interviews and the focus group method is? A focus group is used in the paper I read for this weeks seminar, and that implies that you as a moderator want the participants to feel free to partly come up with the discussion topics themselves. You just have to steer them in the right direction from time to time as to keep the discussions relevant to your research questions. I don't have a lot of experience using semi structured interviews, and to be honest I haven't googled it either, but would you say that the two different methods have a lot in common? What separates them in your opinion?
Hi Carl. You're asking about the differences between the methods of semi-structured interviews and focus groups. I'd like to give my answer to that. As far as I have understood it, semi-structured interviews are usually done one-on-one, as Filip also mentioned briefly in his comment below. While focus groups are, as the name suggests, done in groups focusing on openly discussing a subject (a relevant topic to the research question/s for example).
RaderaThe semi-structured interviews have a set of questions made up beforehand to be asked to the interviewees, but they are not locked up to those questions only. They are also open for bringing up other relevant questions and follow-up questions of interest during the interviews.
This is what I think mainly separates them. The things they have in common in my opinion would be the possibility to bring up a discussion with both methods, but it's a little more difficult with the interview as they would be discussing with only you and you might unintentionally lead their answers to a certain direction if you're too involved.
Hi!
RaderaI'd like to elaborate on the use of focus groups. I helped set up a focus group with teachers at KTH when doing my bachelors thesis. One of the reasons for doing a focus group as opposed to interviews was that we was hoping the discussions in the group would bring up points we would not have thought about asking in an interview.
In general I believe focus groups can be a good way to understand how a group operates, maybe at the cost of a more nuanced perspective each individual group member could provide in an interview.
Hi Jakob, Facebook usage is always interesting to analyze in my opinion. Did the author say something about the characteristics of these Facebook users that they interviewed? For example, did they all have good knowledge about using Facebook and were they daily users or? How did they recruit the subjects (you mention 16 being students)? I agree that the semi-structured interviews could be a good choice for this paper but it feels like a questionnaire could have been a good complement to make more generalizations as well. If we talk only about qualitative methods, then i think a focus group could have been good, as Carl talk about in the previous comment. I think this topic would have been very good to discuss in groups instead of just interviewing one-on-one. That would have made it easier to differences in user behaviour and to draw upon parallels between different subjects habits and usage.
SvaraRaderaHi!
RaderaThe thing about this study is that the researchers was looking mostly at the thought process of the Facebook users interviewed. I believe those kinds of results could be difficult to obtain from a questionnaire study.
On the other hand, a questionnaire or another type of quantitative study could be a great way to follow this up, and insure the results hold up when looked at from a different perspective.
Hi. You wrote that new user behaviors were discovered by researchers that they hadn't thought about before during their pilot interviews. Because of that discovery, they could adjust their study. That sounds interesting to me as the pilot affected their study to that degree. Without that adjustment, I wonder if the conclusions would have been different. Was it mentioned in the paper what kind of user behaviors were discovered or what adjustments were made? That's something that we can learn from, reading their motivations and reasonings.
SvaraRaderaThe thing they discovered was that many of their informants were directing a lot of attention to managing their social networks, for example categorizing their contacts into lists. They realized this area had received little attention in other studies and redirected their study to also include these types of reasoning. What I would like to know, however, is what their study looked like before doing this.
RaderaI think, in general, this is some kind of a best case scenario where the researchers know their field well enough to realize what they are observing has not been very studied. It's probably a good idea to at least try to keep an eye out for situations like this when doing you own research...
I think interviews is a great method to use in qualitative studies since you get to connect with the people you talk with on a more in-depth level. I too have experience from semi-structured interviews from my bachelor's thesis, although we only had 5 participants. So I greatly respect their efforts in getting 35 people to partake in their interviews. The transcribing part of the research must've been a nightmare...
SvaraRaderaYour paper is a perfect example of why a pilot study is good practice when conducting a qualitative research. If you lack in this area the results can, in worst case, be useless, just consider a badly formulated question which could result in inconclusive answers.