Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research Pre

I read this paper, Gilbert et al. (2013). The psychological functions of avatars and alt(s): A qualitative study. Computers in Human Behavior 32 (2014) 1–8.

I’ll shortly describe the core of the paper with a citation from it:

“Prior research has shown that approximately 50% of active participants in the 3D virtual world of Second Life have one or more secondary avatars or ‘‘alts’’ in addition to their primary avatar. Thus, these individuals are operating a ‘‘multiple or poly-identity system’’ composed of a physical self, a primary avatar, and one or more alts. However, little is known about the functions these virtual identities serve for the virtual-world user.”

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

The method contained Semi-structured interviews with second life participants; they were done within the virtual 3D world. The participants had to have a primary avatar and at least one or more secondary avatars. The study found the participants via an announcement in second life’s calendar.  After the interviews they got virtual in-second-world money as compensation of participation.  Other factors that could impact the results regarding the method were: That they had been a member in second life for at least 6 months, that they were 18 years or older, and only in-depth English speaking people could participate. During the interviews the participant described “their primary avatar, their physical self, and then each alt.”

They made coding rules for data: bottom-up and top-down design were used to come up with these. Prior research as well as interview data gave them a model to interpret the results in relation to the coding-rules.

Limitation according to the paper: Small sample of in-depth interviews as “their labor-intensive nature often constrains the size of the sample that can be used“. This small sample makes it hard to generalize in relation to how many users there are within Second Life. In the paper they stated that their paper is only descriptive of how you could do future studies, and this because of its limitations, it should be seen as a starting-point. The study only applies to Second Life and not other virtual worlds. The small scale of participants made them not see a frequent answer as more important than an answer that was not frequently maintained, they said caution is needed.

Benefits according to the paper: “Qualitative techniques are useful when an area is not well studied or understood as they can reveal nuance and context that is difficulty to capture through quantitative techniques alone”.

Other advantages and disadvantages: They performed the interviews in Second Life which made them catch active participants and geographically distant participants, however would they’ve given the same answers if they were interviewed in person (as their physical identity).

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

I think I knew pretty much of it since theme 4 and 5 past 2 weeks. One thing that I did not know about was the coding of interview data, and how they cooperated to analyze the data. That it can be done in such systematic way, based on previous research, coding rules, the data itself and a model.

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

Further on, as they wrote that more frequent answers do not necessarily imply that they are more important. It’s not generalizable, not even within second life. The method could’ve included a larger scale of participants, maybe by hiring people to perform the interviews if possible with the use of a framework/interview-form and training. To be a bit harsh, it could’ve included non-English speakers, to give the generalizability more potential. The participants could’ve also been interviewed in all their identities, as the psychical self, primary avatar, and other avatars to see if their identity varied (a time-span between the interviews). According to the paper, one woman didn’t understand the questions and her results were therefore left out, unnoticed misunderstanding like this could’ve been easier avoided in a face-to-face interview, but that would’ve had other disadvantages. The coding and the analyzing of the qualitative data included different opinions on how to interpret things according to the paper. I think they had a good strategy with coding rules; still they weren’t able to agree. I think a larger scale of participants could’ve solved this problem, partly.

Read the following article:

Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building Theories from Case Study Research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532-550.

Select a media technology research paper that is using the case study research method. The paper should have been published in a high quality journal, with an “impact factor” of 1.0 or above. Your tasks are the following:

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

The case could for example be a situation, event, person organization of some kind, and the study’s aim is to get deep knowledge about that particular case. It aims to describe, explore, and explain. Such deep knowledge means that lots of time spent on that case is needed and often you look at a single or few cases rather than multiple because of this.

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 participants in relation to the main-questions of the study are good in relation to the amount of samples the study had since Second Life seems to be the most popular virtual world. There was however a lot of factors that could’ve had an impact (mentioned above) and no priori research saying that Second Life could represent virtual worlds, which is a weakness in terms of generalizability. Participants participated voluntarily which is a weakness (not totally random). The study concerned both quantitative data and qualitative data, except for the interviews, the gathering of data also included a web-form. However, the different ways of gathering data did not confirm each other as the questions/data from them were unrelated. This could however show relationships that the researcher didn’t know about. There’s no over-lapping in data-collection and data-analyze, coding rules were made and it’s clearly coded before it’s analyzed. From each participant there’s not a lot of data over a longer time of period, the interviews were extensive but only made once, and the model helped analyze the data. The paper seeks no cross-case patterns between different virtual worlds except for maybe the descriptive parts. The cross-case patterns between the participants were found via “categories”, multiple people coded this lead to disagreement on different points which otherwise wouldn’t have been found. Comparing with similar literature. Lastly, I think that the paper closes before the marginal for improvement becomes small, more patterns and and discussion could’ve been made but it’s unnecessary because of the descriptive purpose and the limitations of the study.