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.