Reflections prior to Theme 6

So this weeks theme was about qualitative methods and case studies.

I chose "Internet and Social Media Use as a Resource Among Homeless Youth" (Rice, Barman-Adhikari, 2013)

1. Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods? 
   They are using a survey in order to get qualitative data form participants. It's easy to use and you can get more data in a more sufficient way, but limitations are that- compared to interviews- you wont perhaps get as much in-depth answers from the participants. When conducting an investigation, where the aim is qualitative research, you ask yourself not how many people feel a certain way, but rather why they feel this way. To get a deeper understanding. 
   
2. What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
   I learnt that even though you choose an empirical way of collecting data quantitatively the end result/discussion can still be qualitative. The questions can still describe the behaviour of the participants.
   
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
   They could have conducted interviews. It's hard when there is a lot of participants, and interviews would not represent a whole group, but it would open up for a deeper discussion about why people feel like they do and so forth.
   

1. Briefly explain to a first year student what a case study is.
A case study involves going in-depth on a certain "case". It can be used to test/generate theories, A case study does not aim to reach some kind of universal/generalized truth, but rather to explore and describe either maybe a participant or a group.

2. Use the "Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research" to analyze strengths and weaknesses of you selected paper.
I'll stick with the paper I chose above for this as well. From what I can tell by looking at the Table 1 the first thing that comes to mind is that they did not have that many data collecting methods. They did not combine qualitative and quantitative data. There were not much literature about this topic so I will disregard that point. These were the weaknesses, and other things mentioned in the table fits quite well with what I could find in the paper.

As I already mentioned above, the paper could probably benefit from more qualitative data in terms of interviews.