måndag 19 oktober 2015

Links to comments on theme 5






Theme 6 - reflection post

For this week´s theme we read two different papers, one with qualitative method and the other paper was about a case study. Since the first method was pretty familiar to most of us, due to previous themes and courses, the case study became the centre of attention during the seminars group discussions.  For this theme the lecture got cancelled so we had the one seminar to discuss the theme. In my opinion the lectures have been better if the theme have more of a fact base rather than a philosophical, so I it was to bad it got cancelled. But I think that the seminar was good and we got some interesting topics to discuss.

During the seminar we as usual sat in smaller groups and discussed the theme and what we all had troubles with was that it was hard to know for sure if what you read was a case study or not. Some was smart and made sure that the paper had "case study" in the title but it was something we thought showed the difficulties with having to read first and then know what it is. We all felt that this made the case study analysis fell short. So know after the seminar I would like to ad to my analysis that step 4: entering the field was a weakness of the study, they did not really describe how it was and looked like.  

In the end of the seminar we had a general discussion and here are some of the topics:

Qualitative methods:
·      It could be by doing by interviews, it the response that matters not how many they ask. It can be 10 000 people, yes but can it be or 1?
·      Provide data that can be generally applied.

Quantitative methods:
·      You can use quantitative method on one person: one example scenario could be if you have a rare disease and try to find a cure.

Case study:
·      Case study can it be to study one person and his characteristic. If he is one of his kind due to his head injury.  
·      If you have more than one with the disease and you study it then it stops being a case study.  à Then it could become a qualitative research if you start seeing similarities between them.
·      Something new, something that have not been looked into before if when you should do a case study.
·      Case study can be a way to start a big study, and once you have more knowledge about that specific event. Then you can move on and see how that compare in the bigger picture. Ilias mentioned one example about kids, if they al of a sudden wear pink outfits, then you start off by study the one person and when that is done you can move on and look at the broader picture and use another methods.


At the end of the seminar a question was about why did we have this course earlier and I this it got a good answer that will be a good way to end this last reflection post: knowledge is easier to receive if you have tried and failed first. And you are never done with knowledge you will learn though out your life as long as you are willing to.

söndag 11 oktober 2015

Link to comments on theme 4






Theme 5 - reflection post

This week had a different setup compared to the other weeks, instead of having one lecture and one seminar we had two lectures. The two lectures differed quite a bit, the first one was in my opinion the better one, it felt more prepared and had a structure. The second one I think would have been better if was in a different setting, like a seminar. Because it was a very interesting person who held the lecture, but since he did not know that he was about to have this lecture it become pretty messy and confusing at times.


Part one:
Habio Li had the fist lecture and it was about the process and the five steps from getting an idea to selling it.

Step one: How to come up with an idea?
There are many problems that we have to day, what you need to do is to define one problem. It is when you have done that you can move on to find the idea of a solution. Li explained that if you spend 90% of you effort in defining the problem and 10% on solving it you will find a much better solution than you would if you spent your time the opposite.

Step two: How to filter the idea?
If you get more than one good idea, how should you choose the one? One way is to ask you questions like:
-       - Does the solution address the pain point of the problem?
-       - Can I do it, with the knowledge and the existing technology?
Li also talked about finding the billion-dollar idea, you should think of if you can make any money of you idea. I am a bit conflicted to that statement, for me personally I am not doing it the money and I think if you are I could lead that you never will be satisfied. I think that there are many great ideas even though you won´t earn billions of dollars of it. But I am not naïve, money is a important factor so I do agree that it is a important to consider.

Step three: How to validate a good idea?
Proof of concept, you should be able to see how the solution will help with the problem. By doing this being able to see its feasibility.

Step four: Evaluate the idea.
Make a prototype of the idea so that you can let others try it and give their view of it. By doing this you idea can develop into something even better. You can make sure that other people will understand how to use it and understand the purpose of it.

Step five: Marketing, selling the idea.
By now you understand the value of your idea but now you have to make sure that potential investors understand it too. 

Overall I think it gave a good idea of how the workflow can look like and I think Li made a good point with explaining the importance potting effort in understanding the problem first. If you do that the rest of the steps will be easier.



Part two:
During the lecture we talked about prototypes and if it can be seen as a research tool.  And the answer is yes, but it is one part of the method, which also contains research question, design and analysis.

Research method:
"Interviews is a stupid way to gain knowledge I you don´t do anything with it". 
So the importance is to have a good analysis of what you get from the interviews.


In the study of Anders Lundström the process was the imperial data – experimental design together with a small analysis (stat of the art) and interviews.

fredag 9 oktober 2015

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.