- Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
- What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
- Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
I read the paper ““Maybe you don’t want to face it” – College students’ perspectives on cyberbullying” published in Computers in Human behavior (Impact factor: 2,69). The article aims to learn more about college students opinion on cyberbullying and how they are affected by it in social and learning environments. When collecting data the researchers used a qualitative method to gain a deeper understanding, which is also the methods biggest benefit, of the students definition of cyberbullying and to later on determine if they perceive cyberbullying to be an issue. They also chose this method because they felt that little research has been made on the subject by using qualitative methods.
Six focus groups, of 6-10 participants per group, were conducted by the two researcher. Taking turns on one asking the questions and the other taking notes. To be able to conduct good interviews you need be experienced or educated researchers, in this case they both were experienced and felt that they were well enough qualified. Makes me wonder though, how are we to know for sure?
The participants were found through different methods, such as posters on billboards or informing younger students during class. Usually this is also a limitation when it comes to qualitative researches; it’s hard to find volunteering participants. In fact they got a total of 54 students, where all of the participants received course credits and a $25 gift card. This is something I see as a potential methodological problem. The participants may have participated for the wrong cause, and their level of activity during the focus groups may have been affected by the thought of being in it only for the money or course credits. Another limitations is that even if they got quite a few students all of them were from the same college which can not make their research generalizable to the general public.
I am also dubious on focus groups on a subject that can be sensitive is the best method. The students were all from the same school, only that can make a student not wanting to share sensitive personal opinions. I believe a combination of interviews one-on-one with half the students would have been a good complement to the focus groups. They could also have improved the unequal gender participation. 85% were females but the researcher did not distinct the males from the females in the results or conclusion.
Something I felt the researcher did very well that was new to me and I found to be smart was the way they analyzed the data collected. They decided to each go through all the transcriptions made by a hired third party independently. After this they met up and summarized their findings with each other. Later on they had a follow up focus group discuss their findings and see if they agreed or disagreed.
Source:
Golman, M. & Crosslin K. (2014). “Maybe you don’t want to face it” – College students’ perspectives on cyberbullying. Published in journal: Computers in Human Behavior. http://www.sciencedirect.com.focus.lib.kth.se/science/article/pii/S0747563214004476
- Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
- 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.
1. A case study is an in-depth investigation of a subject that is used to look at individuals, groups or communities. The data is collected through different methods, such as interviews observations. Case studies are a form of qualitative descriptive researches. The goal of case studies is to understand the complexity of the case study in every way possible.
2.
Paper: The social sharing of emotion (SSE) in online social networks: A case study in Live
Journal: Computers in human behavior
Strengths:
- Clear and well defined research questions in the beginning. This is something that is pointed out to be important by Eisenhardt because a good research focus helps the authors not to loose the main theme and start collecting unnecessary and confusing data.
- More than one person did the research in this case study. This increases the chances of getting a better perspective on things and possibly new ideas and insights on the study.
- They used different tools when collecting data which is also something preferable and strengthening for case studies.
Weaknesses:
- According to Eisenhardt a good case study is built on 4 to 10 cases. This study had 3 cases which affects the complexity of the study.
Source:
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