The
theme for this week was qualitative methods. I think it is an
interesting theme since I will probably use some kind of qualitative
method for my master thesis. During the seminar we added methods to a
wiki page and also stated the advantages and disadvantages for every
method type. We also wrote a description for every method type and gave
examples of studies using the respective methods and also an example of
good tools for the method type. The paper I chose used content analysis
as the method, and two other people in my group had that method for
their papers as well. At the seminar we discussed the term
“triangulation” and how it can be used and why it is good to use it. In
general I think it is good to try to combine both quantitative methods
and qualitative methods, if it is relevant for the task of course. As I
have mentioned earlier, I think it is good that we create wiki pages for
these kind of things. It helps you remember what all terms are about.
Except for the seminar this week we also had a lecture with Ylva
Fernaeus from the HCI department at KTH. She talked about her paper that
we read and about design researched. As design research is the theme
for next week I think it was good to bring it up with the help of this
lecture. And as it is mentioned on the theme page, this lecture this
week served as a bridge between qualitative methods and research design.
We
had a meeting with our group for the group project. We have not done
that much this week, and that is because all of us were quite busy with
other courses, so we will need to get more productive the coming week as
the deadline for the project is on Friday the 30th. But we did discuss
our topic and kind of refined our main question a bit more and sorted
out some potential misunderstandings.
I was familiar with most of the methods we went through during the seminar, but content analysis was a bit new and seemed interesting. It felt like it was a method that probably benefits from media technologies since a lot of user generated content is available on the Internet, especially on social net work sites such as facebook. I definitely believe it is a method that will keep growing as long as people in some degree live their lives on the web. Since communication on internet mainly is textbased it's probably also easier to analyze than non-textbased content.
SvaraRadera