This week we have all been reading two new
papers and analyzed them within the frame of the course. One of the papers
should include a quantitative element in the research and the other paper
should include a case study approach. For the first paper I read “Noise in an
intensive care unit” which is a rather short paper that discuss the possible
problem with high and continuous noise in an ICU. The authors made use of data
collection from surveys and measuring. The surveys targeted the staff and the
measures the noise in the ICU. It is clear that the survey in this paper is the
qualitative part of the research and that the measures are the quantitative
part. For me it makes actually more sense to focus on the staff’s opinions and perception
of the noise rather than the actually noise in it self. But as always when it
comes to gather information or data from people there is always some
uncertainty in the data collected and I don’t know if you can account for this
uncertainty in a quantifiable manner? Still I think that if you are to
undertake a research project that involves how some object/process/event
affects people you should value the affected peoples views on the matter higher
than possible collected data. Can’t say that I actually learn that much from
the paper’s methodology but I think that they could have included the patience
in the survey as well. They would probably have more to say about the noise
than those who work in this noisy environment.
For the second paper we have read a paper
that involved a case study of some sort. I’ll start with give my understanding
of what a case study is and why you would be interested or enforced to include
a case study in a paper.
A case study can be necessary when the available theory doesn’t include the field you are about to research. This can
be because of shifting or new technology, which in ICT case are bound to happen
sooner than later, considering the exponential development in the field. In the
end your case study will be the major theory in your paper, or the tool you use
to support you theory. This was my understanding what a case study refers to,
after I had read the paper “Building Theories from Case Study Research”. Now to
the tricky part, I can’t seem to find a paper that is structured strictly on
this approach presented in the paper above. So I have instead looked at a paper
and tried to think of the case study as research that make use of a case study
as a method to examine a problem under certain given conditions. Although in
the paper “Building Theories from Case Study Research” (BTCSR) it is stated
that:
The
case study is a research strategy, which focuses on understanding the dynamics
present within single settings.
So I might not be that far of in my
interpretation.
The paper I have read is “The firm, the
platform and the customer: A “double mangle” interpretation of social media for
innovation” and explore the relationship between human actors and technology in
the context of a social media platform. The paper starts with defining the aim
of the paper, which is “The tuning process through which the technological and
the social achieve an interactive stability”. I can’t say that the paper talked
about their case study as a generic one at first but instead presented exactly
what the attributes of the case study would be. As of the BTCSR paper it is
stated that it is good practice to first work with a generic case study, which
not specify the “attributes”. The paper in question did however combine both
qualitative and quantitative data and compared their analyzed data with
previous theories that they also presented in the introduction in the paper.
They did also reach conclusion in both the theoretical and practical area of
the research ad present these findings in the end of the paper. A last remark
of the paper is that it had a horribly layout and made it hard to read.
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