Theme 6: Qualitative and Case Study Research

For the sixth and final theme of the course we are discussing about qualitative and case study research. Before the lectures next week we are to read:

• Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building Theories from Case Study Research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532-550.

The article describes how to build theories from case study research. It also gives a general definition of the construct ‘case study’ (see below).

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

A case study is well-explained by Eisenhardt as:
“A case study is a way of using a single or several examples of “real-life” phenomena, events or persons to analyze and consequently derive conclusions. Methodologies used in case study research usually include combinations of qualitative and/or quantitative methods as well as empirical and theoretical studies. It can involve different cases and multiple levels of analysis.”

Furthermore I looked some more and I found another well-reasoned definitions of case studies by Gary Thomas:

"Case studies are analyses of persons, events, decisions, periods, projects, policies, institutions, or other systems that are studied holistically by one or more method. The case that is the subject of the inquiry will be an instance of a class of phenomena that provides an analytical frame - an object - within which the study is conducted and which the case illuminates and explicates."

In my bachelor essay (discussing identities on Facebook) my partner in crime and I used focus groups in which we discussed questions regarding our thesis. To begin with it was very much of a qualitative study until we after the sessions noticed that a majority of the participants felt similar about sharing privacy settings. We could actually conclude some quantitative graphs and diagrams from it. Thus we used a type of case study which ended up being both a qualitative and a quantitative study.


For theme six. we were also to choose our own paper that should use qualitative methods. I chose to read:

• Kelling, N. J., Kelling, A. S., & Lennon, J. F. (2013). The tweets that killed a university: A case study investigating the use of traditional and social media in the closure of a state university. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(6), 2656-2664.

The article was very well-reasoned and I thought it was interesting since I’ve lived in the area the paper discusses. The title of the paper is self-describing but basically it investigates which social mediums college students at South Florida Polytechnic University (USFP) use to receive and share information about their university.

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

The article used two experiments. The first was a student survey where students were to answer questions about their social media use and how they conceive news. The other experiment was an analysis of social media data where selected data regarding USFP was conducted. I would say that the first experiment is a quantitative method, while the social media data collection is a qualitative method.

The survey should be the more objective of the two, since it presents data and (could have presented) illustrations based on the result. The data collection method on the other hand is more subjective because the researchers have chosen how to interpret the result. Of course, I think all types of methods are in a way subjective since you can’t ask all questions (i.e. you can’t gain knowledge a priori) but I would rather see it as a scale, where the survey is less subjective than the collection of data.

There are both limitations and benefits with the methods used in the paper. In general, please see the post from theme 4 where I discuss the benefits and limitations of both quantitative and qualitative methods. Specifically for this paper I would say that Kelling et al could have perhaps performed focus groups with participants from the survey and discussed their findings with them. I think they do have a good research but to increase the value of it, I think focus groups would help even further.

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

I hadn’t thought of the method of collecting data. This would have been a useful method in my bachelor thesis where we let the participants in a web survey check if they knew how much personal information they shared in Facebook. This led to a subjective answer from the participant where they could ‘cheat’. If we instead, would have conducted the answers we could get a more objective view of the results.

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

Please see question 1. I would say they could have presented the article with more illustrations to simplify for the reader. When doing illustrations, perhaps Kelling et al would have noticed correlations they haven’t seen before too. I too think, as I wrote above, that the article would benefit from focus groups.

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

Step 1 ‘Getting started’: Yes, this step was fully achieved in the article. The facts and information about USFP, how college students perceive news and social media was very well-reasoned.

Step 2 ‘Selecting cases’: Yes, I think they were very clear on what population to investigate and they argued for its sake too.

Step 3 ‘Crafting Instruments and protocols’: Yes, the social media data collection was very well-reasoned.

Step 4: ‘Entering the field’: Yes, Knelling et al smoothly connected their web survey and their data collection in a nice way.

Step 5 ‘Analyzing data’: Yes, Knelling et al used several tools to conduct and analyze the data.

Step 6 ‘Sharping evidence’: I think Knelling et al could dig deeper in this area. I think they could be able to see more relationships than they end up doing. By doing more illustrations I think they would get a better picture of their work and perhaps see more correlations.

Step 7 ‘Enfolding literature’: Yes! Kelling et al really draw parallels to the deep and wide literature section they presented in the beginning of the essay.

Step 8 ‘Reaching closure’: Yes, Kelling et al describe what they thought they would see as a result and what they ended up seeing. Thus I do think they reached closure.

I’m not sure if this is the way to approach the paper and analyze it with the table below. However, I’ve done my best to do so but it will be interesting to discuss it further on the seminar. Last time we were to analyze different areas of theory I kind of misunderstood the question. Or no, I interpreted it in another way :-) and it will be interesting to see if I’ve done so this time too. Anyway, some final words on Kelling et al’s article are that I think it was a very well-structured paper that is why I think they’ve achieved most of the steps from Eisenhardt.