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.