Reflection of theme 6

This week I've had a couple comments on my stance on qualitative and quantitative methods combined. My initial thought have been (since theme 4) that one should utilize qualitative methods before using quantitative methods to ensure a good survey or questionnaire that would catch all different responses possible.

However, I've naturally realized since then that how and when you use qualitative methods depend largely on the type of situation you're in. If you have great background knowledge, maybe you don't need any introducing interviews to help you start off your research. Instead you might want to understand your (quantitative) results better by for example conducting final interviews to make sense of a large amount of data.

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The paper about student's use of Welsh in Facebook - the first paper I had picked for this theme - contained both qualitative and quantitative methods. Looking back at previous themes, I kind of see some problems in its quite broad, investigating problem statement. Using Gregor's 'Theory Types', I think it could be classified more as 'Analysis' than anything else, in large because its results are hard to validate or compare with other studies. Although the results were comprehensive, the data was also more or less all self-reported by students, which is another problem in its own.

Its qualitative method was all about small focus groups, and a problem with this, as discussed, was how someone can take over the group discussion while others may be too embarrassed or shy to speak their opinion. At the same time, a focus group might discover new things together that one-on-one interviews might completely miss, for instance if one focus group participant comes up with an idea that nobody else had thought about, but agree upon, and then is able to expand upon this idea together.

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My second paper about online participation in public service news in Europe was a more fitting ending to this course, I think. It had a well defined problem statement in investigating online participation, and utilized case studies from quantitative data. Although one might think it would have been good to also include some interviews with people from each public service company, it wasn't really necessary due to its quantitative results speaking for themselves. In fact, applying interviews or other qualitative methods in this case might have been wrong, simply because the problem statement in a way excluded potential personal wish-thinking from company directors or such, by just looking at the statistics gathered. And since the statistics were clear enough to understand by themselves, it managed to answer its research questions. Therefore I would classify its 'Theory Type' as 'Explanation'. However, had the problem statement been broader to include people's perceptions and needs, it would have been very interesting to conduct interviews or focus group discussions to evaluate what more needs to be done, and thus further evolving this paper's 'Theory Type' to both 'Explanation' and 'Prediction'.

When discussing this paper with some classmates, I realized that my perceived thought of it being skewed due to only taking data from 'uneventful' days perhaps was not a big issue, since the study included five case studies in total, and so "they were in that case all skewed in the same way".

Reaching theoretical closure is something I would consider almost impossible, at least if your research question isn't extremely narrow. I've learnt that it's also interesting (in a research paper) to reach the conclusion that more research is needed in some aspects X and Y, or that results were difficult to analyze for some reason Z. This still brings the research community forward in a way.