Theme 6

Reflection from lectures:

It was really interesting to hear more about the researchers view on her own projects and what, according to her, could be classified as a qualitative research depending on what you want to find out. She said the project was about showing the many possible implementations of actDresses and therefore it was no need to make an extensive and time consuming qualitative research. I also found interest in her idea about a typical research process in which she defines the different steps by: You think, you go check it up, you take notice, you convince they and they accept it.

In the second presentation he talked about the necessity to sometimes take a step back to see what you can make by changing the approach to the problem and search for alternatives earlier in the progress or attempting a changing, for example, in the setup of the device. It was very inspiring to hear him talk about the subject and the examples he brought up showed how progress was created by mounting a camera on the person instead of improving a fixed cameras ability to detect the movements.

The paper I chosed was

Bottom-Up Technology Transmission Within Families: Exploring How Youths Influence Their Parents' Digital Media Use With Dyadic Data

It included a good qualitative study and in a way a relation to the paper about actDresses we read last week.

In the paper they look into the buttom-up (youth to parent) transmission process in areas of varied levels of technology diffusion, in such countries as chile.

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

They are measuring structural factors of the participants. these are youths age, gender roles, family socioeconomic status.
they also measuring the Family culture, parental authority and child-parent interaction.
It consists of a sequential mixed-methods research approach and dyadic, relation, data.

The methods used are interviews and a buttom-up transmission survey. I found the interviews good and in which they use one hour sessions with 28 participant.

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

That it is a lot of problems with the perception of the participants in what way they answer the questions. These problems involve the culture differences and social differences.

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

They put a lot of effort into the method used for the measuring the social aspects of the transmission.
Maybe they could have developed the technological aspect by more means and more comprehensive look into the what the kids actually know and explain what they know. Maybe they already have results regarding this and if that case they should have put more effort in pointing at this in the paper.

To improve the wide of the project they could have added a more specific comparison between different demographics and be more clear if previous work have showed any different.
Even do mention it throughout the text it would be nice to have more analysis about how the culture and other differences between the researchers and the participants affects the outcome of the results.

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

It is a exploratory research of a person or a group of persons. It is used to find underlying principles by exploring causation of the behavior of the person or the group.

When choosing the case group it is important to think of the representativeness of people by information-oriented sampling, meaning that you shoud aim to have a wide diversity of people in order to get a as good result as possible.

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.

They seem to be emotionally close to this subject so in some way they lack in how they perform the way to select the cases which may resulted in more tapered research. They are good at enfolding literature and nearly all statements are backed up by a reference to previous work.

THEME 5

In the paper they investigate the necessity of designing psychical language when controlling and programming robotic consumer products. As such products are in a physical, often without a screen, it is relevant to develop new and user friendly ways for these to be controlled by physical interaction. Given our human culture the text look deeper into how this affects our interaction with the computer, like how we dress for example.

They go through previous work and physical tools used when psychically represent the programming instructions and where they mostly need some sort of PC-based interaction. They see that it may be possible that instructions don't have confined to other physical devices, but visualised and possible to manipulate and change in the

ordinary use setting of the object that you want controlled. for example that interaction, like bending the arm of the robot, could affect the actual code.

By learning from comic, fashion and human behavior the importance of the sensed, desired and expected outcome from the actual user is getting increasingly important, to better understand the balance between appearance and action.

they use three main example:

Pleo:

A Role assembly dinosaur which you can dress according to occation.

In this example scenario they wanted to explore how the standard behaviour of the robot could be altered by letting it change mode or even acquire new abilities.

Glowbox:

With this product they wanted to specifically focus on actions and user interactions that can be sensed and performed by the GlowBots platform on a lower conceptual level than for that of Pleo.

Comic signs for a vacuum robot:

actDresses could enhance a task-oriented robot. This is based on Earlier studies points out that even technomorphic looking robotic appliances can engage users ‘socially’, make it less boring. In this example they have designed a set of comic book like magnetic patches that can be attached to the metallic shield on top of the vacuum robot

How can media technologies be evaluated?By evaluating the usability of the media technology. By collecting data from users measuring the three effectivness, efficiency and satisfaction experienced by the user throughout the evaluation process. Trainabilty can also be measured and give information about how well the specific technoloy is percieved by the user depending on the previous knowledge in for example technology of the user that you conduct the test on.

Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?While you inventing an idea you may be blind to the fact that this idea may not be shared with others. By investigating and comparing with previous similar products you know better if this is a good idea or not. By doing a proof of concept prototype you can see the experience from others and see if it gives any extra value to them and if they would demand it if it existed as a product or service.

THEME 4

Forgot to upload the text from my google docs but here it is!!

I´ve chosen the text “Social Networking Sites: Their Users and Social Implications — A Longitudinal Study” which also was a big topic during previous seminar.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01580.x/asset/jcc41580.pdf?v=1&t=hofs4gbc&s=353814cbf8da9a0b2c7fa3d2a5e40190a9ece0b7

The paper is looking into the rapid adoption of social networking sites (SNSs) which raises important questions about the social implications of such usage. In the paper they also try to answer the questions about whether or not greater use of SNSs leads to greater social capital, and also how social capital develops over time. By investigating the behavior around the usage of SNS and how they reflect the interaction offline they draw conclusions about the how the interaction between people in “real life” affects their participating in SNS.

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

In this study they´ve used a survey to be able to reach a wide range of people (N=2000). The survey has been emailed to people in the span of 15-75 years old and as wide as possible regarding demographic.

Some problems with the chosen method are mentioned in the text. Some of them being that It´s not everyone that´s answering the survey and that it´s also a rather small amount of nonusers answering the research. It was also hard to foreseeing which group that beforehand will be the best to target with the survey and they also start with a wide hypothesis where they make a guess on the contribution of the whole group and then forming the questions around that guess.

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

The importance of selectively choosing your examination group so it includes a wide range of participants. Its important to collect the data properly and be sure of which results that are interesting for the research and that help the forming of a conclusion regarding the subject.

By using quantitative methods its possible to test a hypothesis with statistic data. That way it makes it possible for researchers to prove a theory. The reason for the study in the paper was to investigate whether upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) could be related to physical activity and perceived stress, or not. They sent web questionnaires to the participants and conducted regular follow-ups on the participants.

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

Quantitative methods can at the same show that the hypothesis don't really correspond with the data collected and its also faster and less time consuming than doing more specific qualitative research. In this case the amount of different people from different demographics and with different social background, gender and age is important which makes quantitative a good choice. Regarding the subject of the research its difficult to measure the previous experience with the health care and to know exactly the grade of stress experienced by the people getting the survey.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?Its good for accessing a big amount of data that answer the why, how, when and what with samples from a big group of people. It is also good for investigating the impact over time and make it easy to reach the participants. Because you have to keep the answers short you do not get a very deep insight into the experience of every participant and you have to come up with the specific questions before which may affect how you look at the problem and how you set up your hypothes.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?Its a good way to gain deeper answers and better more extensive answers to the questions Why, How, When. This form of methods demands more time and also demands a better in-deep answer to be beneficial over the quantitative method.

On the other hand It is making it hard to generalize the results due to the few participants. Limitations is for example that the analyse of the data is time consuming and takes a lot more effort than the quantitative. The qualitative methods results in longer and more extensive answers which is good to get a more broad perspective of the issue.