theme 6 - first post

The paper I read was “Connected scholars: Examining the role of social media in research practices of faculty using the UTAUT model” a research paper published in Computers in Human Behaviour. The paper was about how scholars use social media to not only to find out what social media tools they used but also “discover factors that influence intention and use of social media by scholars”. I thought it was a pretty interesting to read since it was a study that I could relate to. During my whole time at KTH I have used social media to communicate with other student and shared information. This course itself is a very good example of this as well, we use blogs as a way to present new knowledge for each theme and read other blogs and comment on them.

1.     Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
The qualitative method in this paper was semi-structured interviews on 51 scholars from different parts of the world and positions. The benefit of using this method is that you can collect data regarding how and why but asking question of that sort and being able letting the participant to elaborate. But also allowing the participant to speak more freely and not being so influenced (hopefully) by the interviewer. The limitation is that it can vary a lot between different interviews, it is only logical that you get more data form a 40 minutes long interview than one that lasts for 15. And it can more difficult as an interviewer to stay as neutral as possible when you by just simple body language can influence the participant’s answer.

2.     What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
- I liked how they did the coding of the data, independently coded the data to find themes in the answers and then compared to see what similarities they could find.  That for me was an interesting way of analysing the collected data.
- They used UTAUT, Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, which normally is used to analyse quantitative data but now was used in a different domain. This was to get out more specific factors that may influence the scholars. And by using this they could easily include other factor on who said what, like gender, age and so on.

3.     Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
- I am not sure how good it was to use UTAUT to analyse the data, I wonder if it took away something since it treated qualitative data as quantitative.
- I never read about if they tested the questions, validate them for the interviews before the actual interviews, even if the aim was for the participant to lead the conversation I think they should have tested the prewritten questions.

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For this next part I read From humor recognition to irony detection: The figurative language of social media a research paper published in Data & Knowledge Engineering. It is a paper about providing a insight into usage of language transmit emotions in social media.  

1.     Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
I had some trouble understanding case study by only reading Building Theories from Case Study Research, so I did some research on my on so I could get a better view of it. It is when you do a depth study of a particular event, field instead of more general study. It is a detailed examination of a subject, which is the so called case. You do full evaluation of the case, this method is used to narrow down a very broad field. By doing a case study you can build a theory around the case.

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.
1, Getting started. - The study had I good introduction, it is clear and work seems so be structured in a goof way.
2, Selecting case. – Narrowed It down to two emotions, irony and humour.
3, Crafting instruments and protocols. – They did a lot literature research and “performed some experiments”, but I do not know of what kind which I see a as a weakness. But the got a lot quantitative data from 50,000 texts from twitter to analyse which if good.
4, Entering the field. –I am not really sure I understand this step, but I would say that since step 3 was well performed this step might not be as prioritised.
5, Analysing data. – This was a strength in this study the used different tools to analyse the data, inter alia SRITL Toolkit.  
6, Shaping hypotheses. – In the discussion they describe the features, but I would not say that they present a hypotheses and that is a weakness according to the evaluation.    
7, Enfolding literature. – Through out the paper I think they did well on using literature.
8, Reaching closure. – The conclusion present the result and how the theory can be used in the future.