Theme 6: Reflection

This week was about qualitative research methods and case studies, and we had to choose two different articles, each using one of these methods.

The article I chose conducting a qualitative research method only ended up using ten people in their study. I personally think that it has to be nearly impossible to get any conclusive or reliable results from such a small study. One can hardly make any generalization with that amount of research subjects, and how valid is the research then? I’ve learnt that this method perhaps isn’t suitable for certain types of research. If they want to study how a technical device/system is being used, it’s perhaps better suited to work with a more quantitative data gathering, and then perhaps finalizing it with qualitative methods. If, for an instance, one is designing a new system, I can see the real use of qualitative research when defining how the system should be designed and perhaps evaluating the product after designing.

The article conducting a case-study I thought carried out a much more suitable research method. They examined a case, used multiple ways to gather data, conflicted with the brought up literature, and in the end – according to me – got more conclusive results than the article mentioned above. I guess I’ve come to realize that case-studies can be really useful when you want to make a new hypothesis or defining a new theory, but it’s more or less something that usually needs to be completed with further research. It’s hard to make any “definite” generalizations outside the studied case, since the population or situation is (or should be) limited to just that case in question. But, in general, I learnt a lot about case-studies, and a lot from Eisenhardt's text. I had a very vague idea about what a case-study was, and now I really see the use of them, especially when it’s concerning new research areas.