Mobile Geotagging:
Reexamining Our Interactions with Urban Space
The first article I chose is called Mobile
Geotagging: Reexamining Our Interactions with Urban Space, written by Lee Humphreys and Tony Liaowhich
and was publish 2011 in the Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication, which has an impact factor of 1.778. In
this paper they focus on a mobile geotagging service called Socialight and how people interact with
it in an urban environment. They do this by exploring Socialight’s ability to
leave “Sticky” notes, where you tag a note of some sort of note to a specific
geographical location, and later on you or another person can read it when
being at that location.
- Research method
In this paper they contacted active Socialight users,
and in the end got 10 active users with which they performed in-depth interviews.
They asked the users question like how and why they use Socialight, what made
them start using it, how they integrated it into their everyday lives, and so
on. The authors also used the service themselves for two years to become
familiarized with it. They used an iterative approach to the collection of data
– they continuously collected and analyzed the data they obtained.
One weakness when doing it like this, which the
authors pointed out as well, is that new mobile services like Socialight tend
to change and sometimes switch focus, and when the study stretches over two
years it might very well be something else than they started out with. Another
weakness is that they could not make any generalizations, since they only had
10 subjects and those subjects couldn’t represent all the Socialight users, as
well as also only Socialight users, not any other kinds of geotagging services.
It is also harder to analyze this sort of data, since the interviews might
differ so much, which in turn can lead to a lacking conclusion.
The tweets that
killed a university: A case study investigating the use of traditional and
social media in the closure of a state university
The second article had to be a case study, and I found
the article The tweets that killed a university: A case
study investigating the use of traditional and social media in the closure of a
state university, written by Nicholas J.
Kelling, Angela S. Kelling and John F. Lennon and was publish 2013 in the
journal Computers in Human Behavior,
which has an impact factor of 2.067. This article is a pretty straightforward
case study, where they investigate the case where social media (mostly Twitter)
led to the ultimate closure of a university.
- Briefly explain to a
first year university student what a case study is.
A case study is, just as the name implies, a study of
a certain case. The case can be a certain person, group, country, current or historical
event or decision, pretty much anything that can be analyzed holistically. It
can be one case or multiple, as long as they can be analyzed as a whole. Case
studies are generally good in new research areas, for creating hypotheses and
theories, and in some cases test and describe theories.
- 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.
The article use multiple ways to collect data - a questionnaire
sent out to students asking things like their media habits and their part in
the closure of the university, and they also data-mined the different media and
social media sources that were active during this event. According to
Eisenhardt this can strengthen grounding of theory by triangulation of evidence.
It also has a specified population. It focuses on the
students attending the university and the media covering the event at the time.
This limits the unnecessary variation and sharpens the external validity.
The article starts by introducing different literature
concerning e.g. how students get news, social media and campus communities, and
how social media is utilized to document events, all of them containing their
own theories. The result of this article was however unexpected. It conflicted
with the previous literature, and indicated that students was not the ones
utilizing social media in this case, it was mainly the media – the journalists
and the politicians. According to Eisenhardt, when comparing with conflicting literature,
the theory can be strengthened because it builds internal validity, raises
theoretical level of the article, and sharpens concept definitions.
A weak point of the theory this article produce is of course
that it only represents a certain population, which makes generalizations
weaker. It is also mainly just a quantitative gathering of data – it doesn’t
really combine with qualitative methods and therefore doesn’t go very deep into
why these specific results were obtained.
The paper about geotagging seems very interesting. If there were any good applications for this purpose as Socialight has (maybe that one is or there are others?) i would be interested to try it out. Maybe it would give you great advice on where to go when you are on holiday and you can see other people notes about places or activities. As you say, a weakness is that you can't make generalizations and that is common with qualitative methods. They didn't say why they did not use a quantitative method to make up for this weakness? As i said in another blog comment, papers should make use of combinations of methods more. It feels like it is uncommon but maybe i am wrong. Otherwise i would know why it is uncommon. Maybe because of lack of time or money.
SvaraRaderaHi Johan. Thanks for an interesting post. Regarding your definition of a case study, I was quite intrigued by your explanation that a case study can be used to create a hypothesis. I've always considered case studies to be utilized after you've already formed a hypothesis and want to narrow it down to one or several specific cases, to investigate its validity or delve deeper into a problem.
SvaraRaderaIn the case of the second paper that you picked (closure of a state university due to traditional and social media), you write that a weak point was that the population was limited and thus hard to generalize. Since its problem statement seemed to be within this one case, how would one have gathered a more general population, in your opinion? I think it is as you say earlier, that it "limits the unnecessary variation and sharpens the external validity." In taking these results to a more general conclusion to encompass other scenarios as well might be stretching the problem too far out of its area, I reckon.