Theme 6 - Reflection

This week’s theme was qualitative methods and case study research.

After the readings I think I just got enough out of it to write last week’s blog post but didn’t really reflect if I learned anything.  Therefore I’ve tried to find some more information from other sources about case studies to understand what it really contains, and after I read the short summary in the CourseWiki I finally felt like it all made sense. So I would like to add some more information to what I wrote about what a case study is, and make the description clearer.

A case study is a research method using one or several examples of “real-life”…

1)   …Phenomena

2)   …Events

3)  …Persons

… to analyse and give a deeper understanding about something. It often includes a combination of quantitative and/or qualitative methods together with empirical and theoretical studies. It can also involve different cases and multiple levels of analysis.

After writing my new description about what a case study is, I feel like I also understand better what it can be used for. One example is when there are several theories that contradict each other. I realized that it can be very useful in the area of media technology because it’s possible to use a variety of methods since media technology is constantly developing. Case study research is used to provide description, test theory or generate theory, which is very useful in media technology just because it’s constantly developing and therefore theories sometimes are new and need to be tested, and sometimes new theories will be generated.