I have read the paper “The Evolving Mobile
Media: Uses and conceptualizations of the Mobile Internet”, written by Lee
Humphreys, Thilo von Pape and Veronika Karnowski and published in the Journal
of Computer-Mediated Communication.
This study looks at the use of mobile
Internet, and examines whether there are cultural differences in the use and
perception of mobile Internet. By interviewing 21 college students; 11 mobile
Internet users from the U.S. and 10 from Germany.
In this study the authors are using
semi-structured interviews, this means that the same questions were asked to
all the participants and the questions were open. The interviews were conducted
face-to-face, and were held in a separate room with each of the 21
participants. The interviews lasted for about 30 min. The questions dealt with:
where and when they use mobile Internet, how they look at mobile Internet, and
the difference between their use of mobile Internet and the use of Internet on
their computer.
The benefits of this kind of qualitative
research are that you can get thorough information, and with these
semi-structured interviews with open-ended responses you have a higher chance
of getting honest answers. A disadvantage of face-to-face interviews is leaded
questions, depending on how questions are consolidated. In this study the
authors had thought about the importance of the participants feeling relaxed during
the interview, and therefore they hired a person who asked the questions. They
suspected that the participants would feel nervous if one of their professors
were held the interview. I think this is an important thing to keep in mind
when conducting qualitative research, if the participants feel relaxed, it is a
higher chance that the person dares to open up and answer detailed and honestly
to the questions.
Just like I wrote in my last week's blog
post, I think it is best to combine a qualitative study with a quantitative
study, to get many and thorough responses which may facilitate the analysis and
lead to a more accurate result. I also think 21 participants is too little to
build a result on.
Briefly explain to a first year university
student what a case study is.
A case study is based on deep-focused data
collection and examines something specific. This can for instance be an event, behaviour
or an individual. A case study examines, describes or explains a phenomenon. By
examining the problem in depth, it is then easier to understand and analyse the
results.
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.
I have read the paper "The Effects of
Piracy Upon the Music Industry: a Case Study of Bootlegging" written by
Lee Marshall and published in the journal Media Culture Society.
This article looks at an area of piracy
known as bootlegging - and discusses how bootlegging can affect the music industry.
The paper describes the distinction between bootlegging and other types of
piracy and then discusses boot leggings effects on the music industry. The
author can not draw clear conclusions from the study, and believes that further
research is needed. The study just presents what the benefits of bootlegging
can be, but to be defined as a good case study, I think it would have required
more evidence.
I think it was an interesting idea to hire somebody to perform the interviews to make the interviewee's more comfortable. This might especially be important if the professor is not so social and capable of talking to people. However I wonder if the professor does not miss out on the chance of following up with one or a two more questions if they receive some really interesting answer during the interview?
SvaraRaderaHej Jenny, I totally agree with your point! From my experience I can say that the success of the study or "how relevent" the results will be in the end, is so much depending on the interviewer. Since I already conducted a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews, it was very crucial to ask further questions or to clarify what I meant in order to avoid a misunderstanding. This means that the person who performs the interviews needs to be deeply into the topic and knows what the professor is exactly looking for. In some cases it can also be good to have someone with a more objective view on things to avoid "leading" the participants to the expected results. But this is always a case to case decision. Not sure though if it was the right one in this example.
RaderaHeya, I also wondered about whether this study would have been better carried out as field research considering one of the questions they want to look at is where and when they use mobile Internet. In this case I would have thought that interviews may not get the correct exact data from the participants in case they don't understand exactly how and when they use mobile Internet - sometimes it can be grey areas.
SvaraRaderaHey Ingrid!
SvaraRaderaI saw that you thought that 21 participants aren't enough to build good results on, I do however believe that if it's a qualitative study and they conduct interviews could that number be enough to produce good results. But since I haven't read the text can't I really comment properly. But when reading, you felt like they hadn't enough empirical data?
Hey Ingrid, I think it's interesting that you decided to pick a paper about music piracy, since it in some papers seems to be of negative impact, while others point to positive aspects. In this post you write that the study itself presented too little evidence to support its conclusion. What do you think would have been ideal to gather this evidence? I imagine that one has to look at a numerous amount of factors, both from the (quantitative) statistics of both record sales and ticket show sales by the artist, as well as qualitative views from artists or consumers who use bootlegging on a day-to-day basis.
SvaraRaderaHi Ingrid,
SvaraRaderaThe paper you’ve read seems quite interesting, in the sense that they want to examine the difference in a cultural point of view. Although, I wonder why they chose two developed countries such as Germany and the US ? I feel that it would have been a considerably more rewarding research if they perhaps would have chosen one developed country and one undeveloped country. Do you agree? I haven’t read the paper but I believe the outcome of the research might have been that the result between the countries is similar to each other?
Also, you argue that 21 people are not an adequate amount of participants to base a result on. But in a qualitative study researcher aim for depth instead of generalization, which means that 21 people in the study should be enough to get a result in the study. As Olle Bälter said during his seminar, the amount of time to transcribe a one-hour interview is certainly time consuming for the researcher.