Theme 6 - Reflection

During the last seminar of this course we began by discussing the papers we had read, first in smaller groups followed by a full class discussion. One thing i found to be interesting is what was discussed in relation to case studies. There seemed to be some ambiguity concerning what a case study actually is. I don't remember all the details at this time, but one example of a case study that was brought up, described how researchers had created an artificial environment, in which they placed their test subjects, to study their behaviour.
I found the topic of qualitative research quite interesting and  perhaps some of the knowledge i gained will come to good use this up coming period.

Theme 5 - Reflection

I could unfortunately not attend last weeks lecture given by Eva- Lotta Sallnäs, so cant really reflect on that. From what i've heard i didn't miss an awful lot. The theme this time was design research and how possible methods of conducting design research. I think i got the idea of the questions, but someone should probably consider revising them till next year, since you couldn't tell if they were of general character or refered to a specific case.

Theme 6 - Qualitative and case study research

I’ve read the article Exploring consumer adoption of mobile payments – A qualitative study, published in the Journal of Strategic information Systems.

Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
The qualitative method used in the paper is focus groups interview. The researchers performed interviews with 6 different groups which were to represent the different phases of the consumer life cycle, for example teens, students and parents.  The group members all new each other since before, as a way of making sure that all the participants would feel at ease in conversation.
As mentioned in the paper the strength of using a focus group lies in the interaction between participants, which can provide the researcher with more elaborated perspectives.
I think that the biggest limitation is that it is hard to draw any broader conclusions based on answers in a focus group, though as mentioned in the paper the idea is to contribute to existing theories on mobile payments.  

What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
Since I haven’t read that much research based on focus groups I learned how this can be used.

Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
I think that perhaps the most important part when using this method of research is the way you choose to compose your focus groups. Obviously the participants will feel more comfortable in a group with familiar people then they would with strangers, but with this group composition you also get a predetermined group dynamic, which I think might influence the outcome and answers of the discussion. I think the study would gain from using participants that haven’t met prior to the focus group discussion. This would put more pressure on the researcher moderating the conversation, but if he or she manages to create a good conversational atmosphere, I think that the result would gain from this.

Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
Using existing qualitative and quantitative data to study a case, which one think is suitable for testing a theory or further develop an existing theory.

Use the "Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your selected paper.
I’ve read the article Customer knowledge management via social media: the case of Starbucks published in the Journal of Knowledge Management. The case study aims to see how Starbucks have acquired information about their customers by using social media.  They use Starbucks as they are mainly a brick and mortar business. While I don’t have any critique against their choice of company (which is well motivated), I couldn’t find any theories in their article that actually opposed their idea of this being a good thing. Obviously customer’s use of social media will allow your business to gather intelligence which you previously couldn’t.  They would have gained from doing an additional study on online based business, and used this for comparison. Their conclusion is as follows: The lessons gleaned from the case study suggest that social media is not a tool exclusive to online businesses. It can be a potential game-changer in supporting CKM efforts even

for traditional businesses. So they really provide some brilliant insight.

Theme 5 - Design Research

1.    How can media technologies be evaluated?
One way to evaluate is to do usability tests as in the assigned article Turn Your mobile Into the Ball. Of course the evaluation should be optimized depending on the platform you’re evaluating. In this case it makes sense looking at the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction but if you’re for example evaluating a speech recognition system you might want to look at intelligibility instead.

2.    What role will prototypes play in research?
I think that a prototype plays a role in research in the sense that it helps create environment which can be more easily evaluated and understood. So if using a prototype one might discover flaws in a system or platform that might not have been discovered if using only questions or such.

3.    Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?
I’m not really sure if this questions regards proof of concept prototypes in general or are referring to the article? Either way I assume that I could be necessary as a way of proving that a concept or theory actually works in reality and serves its proposed function.

4.    What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?
In the article the prototype/test platform consists of a self-designed circuit board with a mock-up mobile attached to it. Clearly the prototype is not as sophisticated as a fully developed product would be, which could limit participants ability to give an answer that in a correct way corresponds to what the researcher is looking to find out.  

5.    How can design research be communicated/presented?
By presenting statistical data in combination with charts, diagrams and mockups. If using prototypes it should clearly be presented in both text and pictures.

How does a collaborative setting differ from a single user setting as regards methodology used and the results obtained?
In the case of Auditory feedback in haptic collaborative interfaces it lets the participants interact when trying to solve their given task. This interaction might result in answers that might not have surfaced if the method was based on a single user setting. The results will also differ in the sense that even though both participants performed the same task they might have perceived it differently.

How can qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study complement each other?
Using a qualitative study gives you an opportunity to further validate results you get from performing a quantitative study and to dig a bit deeper.

How can using both subjective and objective methods give a better understanding of a phenomenon?
To be able to define the value of results based on an objective method, one must have an understanding of the subjective experience of the participants. If for example the objective method is to use a time-test to measure how effective a system is (like the one in the article on auditory feedback), it might also be interesting to see how the participants perceived the performance (which they did), and see if these actually correlate.

Theme 4 - Reflection

This week was a bit different to those previous. We did not have a traditional seminar, but a workshop where we got to test our knowledge on quantitative and qualitative research. The competition format in which the excersises took place was a good way of creating a discussion concerning what the pros and cons of using quantitative and qualitative research.
So what have i learned? I guess that both reading this weeks articles and participating in the workshop might have shed some light on the importance of being meticulous, whether you're conducting a quantitative or a qualitative study, cause the result depends on it. For example, a poorly written questionnaire could possibly distort the result of a whole study. So paying attention to detail is crucial.

Theme 4 - Quantitative Research

1.
I’ve chosen the article Recognition of the Main Melody in a Polyphonic Symbolic Score using Perceptual Knowledge written by Anders Friberg and Sven Ahlbäck, and published in the Journal of new music research.
The study aims to see if they can predict the main melody in a polyphonic score, which is in this case is a MIDI-representation of a song. They begin by explaining the concept on melody and more specifically the main melody, and how this can be perceived. They then try to identify the features that they think will represent how the main melody is perceived in the most adequate way. They use a total of 12 features, some examples of those being pitch and articulation.                             
The method used for predicting the main melody is a multiple regression. What this means is that they are trying to find the best possible model for predicting the main melody based on their perceptual knowledge. The regression model allows them to input and analyze huge amounts of data automatically. Since this is done using machine learning they have the advantage of training their model, and therefore optimizing it before trying to perform the actual prediction.
One limitation using a regression model for prediction is the choice of features may not always correctly correspond to reality, and I guess this is hard to actually prove. A more specific problem with this particular study might be the fact that they use a symbolic representation of music for analysis, while their perceptual knowledge comes from analyzing actual music, and due to this the result might a bit compromised.

2.
I think that the paper shows the complexity of performing a large quantitative study. There are so many variables to take into consideration and in this paper there are several examples of this.
First you have you have to gather participants, and in this case they sent out 5000 emails where 1509 went through to follow up questions and 74% of these participated throughout the whole study, which I guess is a good response rate. Furthermore there are a lot of parameters outside the study that could potentially affect the result, such as pollen season and influenza season, but also how to actually separate influenza from a common cold. I think that as long as you are aware of what the implications might be when performing a study like this, you can always bring that up for discussion in the end, which is done with influenza and a common cold. 
So what have I learned? I think that it is of great importance that you motivate and explain your choice of method, questions and participants. If this is not done correctly (not saying that it’s not in the paper) the result of the actual study would probably be mostly speculations.      

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative/qualitative methods?
I think the obvious benefit is that it enables you to analyze a large set of data which I think gives you room to draw a bit broader conclusions, whereas a qualitative study might not. On the other hand the benefit of performing a qualitative study is that you might receive insight on a deeper level than you could using a quantitative method. Of course this depends on what you are investigating or writing about. If you have a hypothesis, you might want to try it using a quantitative method, and if the result differs from your expectation, you could further investigate why this is using a qualitative method. So perhaps you could say that the limitation of one the methods is the benefits of the other.

Seminar 3 - Reflection

After the seminar i feel that i should probably revisit some of the questions we were asked to answer before hand. What is theory? I found that comparing a theory to a hypothesis made the question a bit simpler to answer. This was also something we discussed during the seminar. Where the hypothesis poses a question, a theory help answer that question. This means that a theory can be built upon one or more hypothesis, but a hypothesis to test a theory.
In the case of the text that i chose to read Digital access, political networks and the diffusion of democracy the title if more of a question or hypothesis and the theories used are those surrounding the subject democracy, digital access and political access. So again, to understand if diffusion of democracy is an actual product of digital access one need to use - or at least i found that to be true in this case -  existing theories explaining the above mentioned topics.