Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research Reflection

I blogged about Haibos lecture in great detail in my last reflection so I’m not going to repeat that, anyways it mainly aimed at last weeks theme "design research". This week we’ve read texts as usual and I’ve also attended a seminar.

During the seminar we were divided into smaller groups where we discussed our texts. Then we asked Leif questions based on our discussions. The main topic concerned what a case study is and how it should be handled.  The mandatory article, “Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building Theories from Case Study Research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532-550.”, already stated much of the seminars main-topic. However, it’s always good with repetition and clarification.  We discussed how a case study is a limited-area or scenario, that the optimal number of cases for building theories from it are 4-10, how you first get familiar with the field and then create the methods to be used, that multiple methods are to prefer, how to define undefined cases as research fields (uniqueness), that they’re often open-ended, that there’s never to little data in a case study but quite the opposite etc. In other words, some case studies have greater potential to build theories from, we’ve checked the potential using the article mentioned above to examine a case study. In summary, depending on if you search for building theories there are preferred ways to do this, however not all case-studies has this intention as some just investigate one singular case.

Other topics we discussed were: discourse analysis and rule coding, mainly the latter. It’s a way to restrict subjectivity and categorize the qualitative results. The thing is that anyone should be able to do the coding and they should get the same answers, it should be objective. So therefore multiple people often do the coding and often they are not the researchers themselves just to avoid subjectivity. The coding is often done on some samples of the results, not all.

Another thing that Leif mentioned during the seminar was how some cases/phenomena’s are described in multiple different accurate ways. He used the two theories describing light as an example, one that uses waves to do this and the other one particles. Both ways are considered correct but the fields can’t cooperate as they could if they were the same field. Within one case-study I think it’s important to find one way to describe the phenomena in order to be convincing and not confusing. If there are multiple possible ways, this should be underlined to make it very clear.

This week I’ve learnt about the difference between case-studies intended to build theories and case-studies intended to research a singular case. How you often go from qualitative data to quantitative data back to qualitative data again and so on, in order to answer your questions, confirm, explore and get deeper understanding. Possible ways to handle qualitative data before analyzing it.