Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

I chose the article ‘“Maybe you don’t want to face it’’ – College students’ perspectives

on cyberbullying’ from the journal “Computers in human behaviour”. This paper wants to study the cyberbullying phenomenon among university students, due to that cyberbullying is seen as not as usual in universities than ar college, and also because the lacking of qualitative studies about this subject. The researchers want to assess the undergraduate students perceptions of cyberbullying and also, they want to determine acceptable interventions to reduce the cyberbullying.

To do this, they recruit 1st and 2nd graders (N=54) of a southern university. These students are divided into small groups, where the researchers can accomplish a qualitative method via focus groups. The research is done by two researchers, which they utilize in the processing part of the study. They analyze the result separately, before they compare and discuss their perceptions. Also, after analyzing their result, they discuss it with a new group of students as a follow up.

The benefits with using focus groups when discussing this subject, is that they don’t have a goal predetermined and therefore the discussions are good because you can adapt the procedure as the discussion developes. Unlike surveys with their predefined questions, in e.g. discussions, you as a researcher can observe the discussion and find important subjects and/or points you have not thought about before. It turned out that the subject “cyberbullying” and its’ definition could differ between the students, and therefore it was an advantage to be able to discuss the subject to make everything clear. As shown in the study, some of the participants found out that they’ve been bullied earlier, but did not know it until after this discussion. If the researchers in this case would have chosen a quatitative methods, like a survey, the result could have been missleading as the students could have perceived the questions differently.

The method used in this paper is a method I have read about before. Therefore, I did not find anything that was new for me in particular. But, I still find it useful to read about different surveys, because you can study how other researchers use the methods in different ways in studies with different aims. In this study, as they were looking for a intervention that could reduce the cyberbullying, I found it smart to use a follow-up group of students that could evaluate their result and give inputs and new reflections.

Since I think the focus groups were a good method to use to this kind of research, it is difficult to state any problems with it. But it may be that this kind of method gives a local result, in means that it is hard to generalize the outcome. The occurrence of cyberbullying may also differ between different universities, which leads to the result being hard to reference to everywhere. To develop the research, they could add a quantitative study, which would make it possible for them to find out the situation in different areas. Further, the qualitative result could then explain why the case as it is in a certain university.

Part 2

In case studies you analyze “real-life” phenomenas, events or persons wherefrom you derive conclusions. The methods used in case study research are quantitative or/and qualitative and are supported with empirical and theoretical studies. The case studies help you to see how real life complexities influence decisions and can involve multiple levels of analysis.

I chose the paper “Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry”. As many companies are not familiar with social media competitive intelligence and analysis and lack of understanding of the process of mining social media data, the authors perform a case study to illustrate how social media data can be transformed into knowledge through text and mining.

The study focuses on the media sites of the three largest pizza chains (in America); Pizza Hut, Domino’s pizza and Papa John’s. And the defined research questions are:

• 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?

The crafting instruments of the study: text mining to analyze text content on their social medias, facebook and twitter.

I think it was hard to find weaknesses since what I in earlier seminars complained about, the lack of the combination of qualitative and quantitative method, is found here. In this paper they use a combination of both methods, and I think they complement each other very well. But, to develop the research, you could have dug a little deeper, with following questions/interviews with the chains. By doing this, you can reach a deeper understanding of ‘why’ the social media sites used in certain ways.