Theme 6

The paper I chose to read is called: Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube, which is about how sharing videos can support social relationships.

Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

The paper consists mainly on three different methods. These are: semi-structured interviews (via phone, chat and face-to-face), observations and content analysis in form of analyzing posted videos, comments, subscriptions and friending. All methods have different advantages and disadvantages, and one might be more suitable in a certain situation than another.

Interviews are good for getting knowledge on a deeper level since there is room for follow up questions and discussion, i.e. the interviewer can steer the interview in the most appropriate direction depending on the answers given. Although the answers given can depend on the current mood of the interviewee. Transcribing the interviews are also time consuming and it can be difficult to keep important and useless data apart since there is a lot to consider, which might also make it hard to find patterns when there are so many answers.

Observations give accurate information on behavior, especially if the subjects do not know that they are being observed, which although might not be the case very often. A disadvantage can be that they result in different conclusions if there are several observers involved, as they most likely interpret behavior in different ways.

Content analysis is a good tool of examination since it is based on data from external sources and is not as dependent on the person performing the analysis but requires a lot of time.

What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?

While reading the paper I noticed how the results were analyzed on a much deeper level compared to what was done in the quantitative paper from a couple of weeks ago. The conclusion was also generalized beyond the actual participants of the study, and taken to a wider perspective.

Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

I did not really see any major methodological problem in the paper. One thing I reacted on though was that the range of examined categories was widely spread, and there were a lot of questions that the author sought to answer.

Questions in the paper:

·         How YouTube users employ technical and social tools of the site to calibrate access to their uploaded videos

·         How video sharing can support social networks

·         How do youth and young adults use YouTube’s sharing and commenting functions to adapt their behavior to different social groups

·         Evaluate how YouTube’s video sharing are conducted in public view (compared to private video sharing) and how this affect social relationships

·         How does sharing videos with certain friends but not others reflect different types of friendships

·         How do young people maintain social connections through public video sharing

As can be seen here, there are many major questions which are sought to be answered in the paper. I would say that simply one of the questions would be sufficient for a thesis, as trying to answer them all in a sufficient way is very difficult to do in a such a relatively short paper, even though I think the choice of methods would be enough to cover it all.

Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.

A case study is a process of using real life happenings such as events, phenomenon or persons in a way of analyzing and eventually coming up with a conclusion. This way of research is especially good when examining a new topic. The resulting theory is often new, testable and built upon empirical results. Case studies can also be used for more than generating new theory, for instance one might use it for testing existing theory as well as providing descriptions.

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.

Selected paper: Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry.

According to the table presenting the process of building theory from case study research the most of the steps are well achieved. The definition of the research questions are clear and well-motivated, hence they are not selected at random. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used, which assures that step three has been taken intro consideration. I think the data analysis is well done as well, as there are different techniques used. For instance two different tools for text mining are used as they found that both of them had their own advantages. I felt like a possible weakness is the comparison to existing literature, although it was presented early in the paper that there simply were not any similar studies done. I accept that statement regarding the pizza business, but I think some parallels could have been drawn to other similar research projects in terms of text mining etc., outside the pizza industry. Another weakness is that only the three largest pizza companies were examined, which limits the ability of generalizing the results. The case would have been different if there were more companies taking part in the study, and perhaps some smaller companies too.