Qualitative study
The paper I chose that is using a qualitative method is “Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube” written by Patricia G. Lange1. The goal of this paper is to explore how youth and young adults use Youtube and how they share and give access of the videos to friends. They use an ethnographic research method in the paper, among others it consists of semi-structured interviews and field-notes on observations on Youtube. The interviews and questions were adapted accordingly to every participants own interests and background based on their Youtube channel. The big benefit of using a method like semi-constructed interviews are that you will get all sorts of data that could be hard to know about before doing the research. It could also be data that is very hard to quantify like individual and complex answers to question like ‘why’ and ‘how’. I think that the limitation of this method is that you could en up with a lot of very individual answers that is really hard to see connections in and make logical sense of.
I am having a hard time understanding the scientific value in a bunch of interviews and answers from individual persons that do not connect to each other. At least, that is what it feels to me sometime. I am not saying that is how it is, I am just saying that I do not understand. For me it almost feel like a research prior to the real research that would consist of better and more precise questions were ‘real’ conclusions could be drawn. The analyse of the interviews are that persons personal interpretation of the participants personal answers and I feel like that is just to narrow to make any substantial conclusions. But, I guess that is not the point of qualitative research. The point is to find answers to complex questions. Questions that can not be answered with yes or no in two sentences. We also have to remember that everything is always an interpretation and we can probably never be truly objective. We are in a paradigm and we do our best with the knowledge we have right now.
Case study
A case study is a detailed and in-depth study of a subject. Different aspects of the subject are studied and analysed. Case studies are often used to develop new theories that are testable and empirically valid.
I have chosen to read “Treating small animal phobias using a projective-augmented reality system: A single-case study”2. In the article they are investigating how we can improve the effectiveness of augmented reality systems to “cure” small animal phobias. They start of by giving a good background of what virtual and augmented reality already does in this field. They then narrow the goal of the paper down to evaluating one new specific technics in this area. To collect data they have four participants with a phobia of cockroaches to study. Four participants seems low to me but the study can still contribute with (like they are saying in the text) new phenomenas and documenting of the efficacy of these new ideas. In the study, all the participants received the same treatment. They were exposed of cockroaches in projected augmented reality while they rated their stress level and talked about how they felt. The treatments function was to ease the participants into getting accustomed to the cockroaches and do not be afraid. The results show that a reduction in fear could be seen, even during the follow ups that occurred 3 and 12 months after the initial study. I think they did a good job of showing that the treatment worked but there is no explanation to why this treatment worked. I would have liked to read a bit more about the thoughts on what exactly in the treatment made it work. I would like to have a theory which there was no attempt at formulating. Also, they did not compare their data to other case studies which I think would have helped in order for them to value the impact and effectiveness of their own method.
I also think that they should have continued the study for longer, and iterate the process to make it more efficient. Now they just stopped after showing that this technique worked without trying to make it better. I feel that there was no real closure in the study and that they could have taken it much further.
References:
1: Patricia G. Lange, Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube, 2008
2: Wrzesien, M., Botella, C., Bretón-López, J., del Río González, E., Burkhardt, J.-M., Alcañiz, M., & Pérez-Ara, M. Á. (2015). Treating small animal phobias using a projective-augmented reality system: A single-case study, Computers in Human Behavior, 49, 343–353. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.01.065
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