Qualitative Research is used to gain an understanding of underlying reasons, opinions, and motivations which provides insights into the problem or helps to develop ideas or hypotheses for potential quantitative research. There are a wide variety of methods which are common in qualitative measurement. The paper I choose is based on the case studies approach. A case study is an intensive study of a specific individual or specific context.
In the past, authors have developed theory by combing observations from previous literature, common sense and experience. Nevertheless, the connection to a actual data has often been weak.
There are seven steps in the process of building theory from case study research: getting started, selecting cases, crafting instruments, entering the field, analyzing data, shaping hypotheses, enfolding literature, and reaching closure.
The case study is a research strategy which focuses on understanding the dynamics present within single settings. Case studies can involve either single or multiple cases, and numerous levels of analysis. Also, case studies typically combine data collection methods such as archives, interviews, questionnaires, and observations. The evidence may be qualitative (e.g., words), quantitative (e.g., numbers) or both. At last, case studies can be used to accomplish various purposes: to provide description, test theory, or generate theory.
The benefits of qualitative method on case study is that case studies allow a to of detail to be collected that would not normally be easily obtained by other research designs. The data collected is normally a lot richer and of greater depth than can be found through other experimental designs. Secondly, case studies tend to be conducted on rare cases where large samples of similar participants are not available. Thirdly, case studies can help experimenters adapt ideas and produce novel hypotheses which can be used for later testing.
The limitations of qualitative method on case study is that the data collection cannot be generalized to the wider population. This leads to data being collected over longitudinal case studies, not always being relevant or particularly useful. Furthermore, case studies are generally on one person, in other words, there is only one experimenter collecting the data. It can lead to bias on data collection, which can have big influence on the results more than other different designs.
Hello!
ReplyDeleteIt seems like your grasp the last week’s theme very well. I agree, I believe "A car-free year” is a case study, because of its combined methods, the study is not hypothesis testing but theory building. The study also tries to understand phenomena (how a car-free year changes the families’ everyday practice) deep in its real context. I think this was a really good project where I learned a lot of case studies. I was fascinating about how much data they collected and how messy the whole process where, and I guess that’s also typical for a case research. As you wrote in your first blog post of theme 6, the limitation with case studies are the difficulties to generalizes the finding to a bigger population, however it would be interesting to do a similar case study and compare to "A car-free year”, would the new sample keep the car or sale it, as the families did in "A car-free year”? To compere different case can help to understand if the results could be representative for a larger population.
Anyway thanks for all you post throughout the course, well done!