Theme 6: Qualitative and Case Study Research

Discursive Equality and Everyday Talk Online: The Impact of ‘‘Superparticipants”

I’m going to chose the same paper as I did for theme 4 Discursive Equality and Everyday Talk Online: The Impact of ‘‘Superparticipants” from the journal Computer-Mediated Communication which has an impact factor of 2.019. This paper mixes both qualitative and quantitative methodology. In this paper, “superparticipants” (users who are very active with posting etc) are observed in a forum.

Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

Their qualitative content was focused on 25 superparticipants who were “randomly” selected. A list of all superparticipants (total over 2,000), by frequency of posting, were created. After that 25 participants were selected randomly. The selected superparticipants’ posting behaviour were researched. However, since only the superparticipants postings were investigated, and there were no actual contact with the superparticipants I believe that misunderstandings could easily happen without the researchers knowledge. On the other hand, the benefit of this was that the qualitative researched could still be conducted a bit more systematically than usual qualitative methods, and it the participants acted “normally” since they were unaware that they were being analysed.

What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?

I had always thought that qualitative methods could only be conducted through an active interaction between researcher and participant. In this case the participants were unaware that they were being researched. So there was no actual interaction or communication - just researchers analysing participants. I also learned that qualitative and quantitative methods can be great compliments to each other.

Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

I believe that communication with the superparticipants (after the analysis of posts) could have given even deeper meaning and reasons behind their behaviour instead of just analysing the behaviour. But this was perhaps out of the scope of this paper.

In this paper the researchers use mixed methodology, that is both qualitative and quantitative. In this particular case using only one research method would have not been sufficient. I thought that the combination of both were very well-done in this article.

Participatory media fandom: a case study of anime subbing.

I chose the article Participatory media fandom: a case study of anime subbing. This article is published on the Media, Culture and Society journal. It’s about people who translate anime (which is usually in Japanese) to English so that more people can watch it.

Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.

Conducting a case study is when a particular “real-life” occurrence is investigated to later derive conclusions or principles. This is useful to get deeper knowledge of a subject. By analysing an occurrence or phenomena that is currently happening more in-depth insight can be found.

A case study is a way of using a single or several examples of “real-life” phenomena, events or persons to analyse and consequently derive conclusions. (https://www.kth.se/social/course/DM2572/page/case-study-research/)

Use the "Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research" (Eisenhardt, summarised in Table 1) to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of your selected paper.

The researches has a very specific target group which is good. They use empirical findings by analysing text written by anime fans as well as interviews of anime "subbers" (people who translate and create subtitles for anime) - this is positive according to Eisenhardts, since the researchers use “multiple data collection methods”. Even though there is not a lot of current literature of the subject the researches seems to have find prior research which they can build their article upon and compare with.

The actual research questions are a bit vague, the researcher more present a statement that they want to confirm rather than questions. This could be improved as it also makes the article more describing instead of actual analysing.