Theme 5 comments

1.http://aris-totall-loss.blogspot.se/2015/10/theme-5-in-retrospect.html?showComment=1445269719076
2. http://theoryandmethodmediatechnology.blogspot.se/2015/10/theme-5-design-research-after-two.html?showComment=1445270008732
3. http://rchcc.blogspot.se/2015/10/theme5-reflection.html?showComment=1445270320136
4. https://agrik.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/design-research-or-research-design-2/#comment-42
5. http://gamlagreker.blogspot.se/2015/10/theme-5-reflection.html?showComment=1445276928342

Theme 6 reflections

For the last theme in this course the lecture got canceled so we wasn’t presented with any new perspective from the lecture. The seminar took place as usual and we sat in groups and discussed the theme of the week. We had all read different papers and I presented my findings along with the fact that I had problems to understand how the paper “Building Theories from Case Study Research” defined “case study”. In the beginning of the paper I understand that they meant I process or tool to create theory that didn’t exist or wasn’t close enough to the field of science before the execution of the research.  But later in the text they define it in a more recognized fashion with the sentence “The case study is a research strategy, which focuses on understanding the dynamics present within single settings”. If I am not mistaken I believe that Illas said in the seminar that the case study is to be seen as “a constructed frame made of fixed attributes where the thesis can be tested”. I feel that I probably need to read up on this prior to my master thesis to be able to handle the case study, if needed.

Theme 4 comments

1. http://aris-totall-loss.blogspot.se/2015/10/theme-4-in-retrospect.html?showComment=1444659898586
2. http://theoryandmethodmediatechnology.blogspot.se/2015/09/theme-4-quantitative-research-after.html?showComment=1444660400960
3. http://blog4course99.blogspot.se/2015/10/reflection-on-theme-4.html?showComment=1444668746841
4. http://rchcc.blogspot.se/2015/10/reflection-of-theme4.html?showComment=1444669185623
5. http://meglia.blogspot.se/2015/10/post-theme-4.html?showComment=1444669918697

Theme 5 reflections

As always I don’t feel that the lectures was that informal, although Haibo’s lecture was interesting. Especially the first part of the lecture when he discussed the fundamentals in engineering in two simple steps:

Define the problem.

Solve the problem.

Further more he also stated that it is a good distribution in time to dedicate 90% on defining the problem and 10% at solving the problem. If you manage to define the problem accurate it can help a lot in the solving part of the process, and if you do not come up with a solution to the defined problem then the work you have done will probably contribute to the development within the field of the question. If you did a good work by defined the problem prior to the solving part. The second lecture for the week I didn’t care much for so I got nothing to say other than it didn’t contribute to the course at all, at least for me.

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

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.

Theme 3 comments

1. http://aris-totall-loss.blogspot.se/2015/09/theme-3-in-retrospect.html#comment-form

2. http://theoryandmethodmediatechnology.blogspot.se/2015/09/theme-3-research-and-theory-after.html?showComment=1444044812860

3. http://blog4course99.blogspot.se/2015/09/reflection-on-theme3.html?showComment=1444045432757

4. http://rchcc.blogspot.se/2015/09/theme3-reflection.html?showComment=1444045854305

5. http://gamlagreker.blogspot.se/2015/09/theme-3-reflection.html?showComment=1444047541926

Theme 4 reflections

After this weeks theme I would say that I have not change my mind about what quantitative research is about. The lecture reconfirmed my understanding that quantitative research is, simply put, merely about the numbers. It is more to it than just numbers of course. Like how you gather, arrange and present the numbers in an objectively manner. According to the lecture we gather quantitative data by asking, measure or observing and then interpreting the collected data with the help of statistic tests. Further more we were presented with Illias report that we also had to read up on prior to the lecture and the seminar. I think that this part wasn’t that interesting at all or rather that the course is kind of misplaced in the course plan. The course is scheduled after we are done with our bachelor thesis and almost 1,5 years before our master thesis. This makes the course fail to be relevant, sadly enough. Once again I would say that the seminar didn’t delivered any hallelujah moment if any kind. In my group we literary had nothing more to say than to agree with each other’s thoughts we had prior to the week’s theme and then we started to chat about our bachelor theses. I would say that our talk about the theses was actually kind of interesting. At least for me.