For my qualitative research paper I have chosen a paper from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication with an impact factor of 1.778 as of writing. The paper I have chosen is Crowd-Funded Journalism.
The main goals of the research in this paper is to dig in a little deeper into this novel business model. For those who don't really know what the concept of crowd-funding is all about, it's basically means that the individual who produces the content (i.e. the journalist) get the income from micro-payments done by the consumers (the crowd). This can also mean that the site running the website can have a business model based on micro-payments from a lot of users who are willing to support the site.
In this specific research the authors try to find out for which type of articles the consumers are willing to make a payment. They concluded that the type of articles that are most likely to make the consumer want to support the site are in the areas of daily living like: public health, local city infra structure. Articles that didn't make the consumers want to pay for their content are articles that are about political and cultural diversity (just to give a few examples).
The methods used in this paper which (in my opinion) helps the authors answer to the typical how? and why? aspects that are especially essential for a qualitative research are:
1. Analysis - In this research the website Spot.us was the subject of research. To give a good view on what makes a reader want to support the site the studied if and how the experience of the journalist affected their decision in paying for an article. Therefore, they got a group of four people together who scaled the journalists qualifications on a scale of 1-10. This was quite extensive but helped them get a really qualitative view on the journalists (based on number of years working, awards etc). So essentially the trustworthiness of a journalist was measured.
The benefit of using this type of method is that the subjective feeling of how trustworthy a journalist is measured. This is good in my opinion since the "gut feeling" so to say is what makes you want to support a journalist or not. The downside could be that the "general" representations of the group of four is skewed and not representative to a "real world" application.
2. Coding - To interpret this data they used an algorithm to see the correlations between the journalists.
In this case they used a well known algoritm based on Cohen's Kappa to check for inter-relations. In other cases this result could be dead wrong if the authors should decide to make their own algoritm. With a well known method, the likelihood of the method giving accurate result is higher.
From this paper I learned that both qualitative and quantitative research can in some cases be necessary to use in a combination to yield the most optimal result. There were a lot of data being processed in this research when it came to the numbers of "pitches" to fund an articles (over 200). But the qualitative part was done on the analysis of this data (the group of four and the algorithm).
Paper based on a case study research
The case study research I chose is The Presence of Hyperlinks on Social Network Sites: A Case Study of Cyworld in Korea which is from the same journal as the previous paper. To start off I would say that a case study is a research that is somewhat exploratory with the aims of being descriptive and to cover a specific "real world" problem and/or event (one single setting). You could say that a study which aims to explain concepts and events, in a more holistic approach.
This paper is to find out to what extent hyperlinks appear in the user-submitted comments on the Korean social network Cyworld.
The authors give a clear view with how the research have been conducted. They do for example clearly state that to what extend the study has been performed: 130 Korean members (whose profile were inspected), time span (April 08' --> June 09'), java based eResearch tool for sample collection etc. On just one page the whole method is clearly understandable. This specific case is also not theoretical in the sense that they speculate, they actually gathered 153,602 comments with actual, real data. Since they also developed their own tools for the study to analyze the data there is also (in my opinion) good reasons to believe the results of the findings in this paper. Further on they explain how they've analyzed the data and what conclusions were drawn, which ties in the whole technical part quite nice. I mean, if you just state that you have bunch of data it doesn't necessarily mean that you will achieve result. By stating how you analyze you inform me as a reader that the data is usable.
I believe that the paper stood well against the Process of building theory from case study research by Eisenhardt and answered them pleasingly.
References
Jian, L. and Usher, N. (2013), Crowd-Funded Journalism. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. doi: 10.1111/jcc4.12051
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12051/abstract
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12051/abstract
Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building Theories from Case Study Research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532-550.
Hello Mårten! Well written above, of your writing was it particularly one meaning I enjoyed extra:
SvaraRadera"From this paper I learned that both qualitative and quantitative research can in some cases be necessary to use in a combination to yield the most optimal result."
I absolutely agree with you, and only have a follow up question. You say that a combination of the two methods can be used to yield the most optimal results in some cases. In your opinion, isn't that always the case? Can't it always be better to conduct both methods when writing a paper?
Good question, and I think you touch upon what Katerina in our group was talking about in my post-reflection (on the same theme) that you don't necessarily get all the benefits of using a combination of several types of methods, but you might just end up with their draw backs too. I do agree with that. I guess a combo suits some research better than others, right?
Radera