For this week I chose to examine the paper Improving Health in Low-Income Communities With Group Texting written by Amy L. Gonzales. The paper was published in 2015 in Journal of Communication. Before answering the proposed questions I would like to give a short summary of the article. The title of the article is quite self-describing but the aim of Gonzales research is to investigate whether group texting can improve people’s health and the neighborhood ties in low-income communities. The paper presents an intervention which was described as “a program that allows people to text other people in their neighborhood when they have a question, need help, see a problem, and so forth. The texts would be group-texts. That is, every time you send a text, everyone in your group would get it and every time anyone else sends a text, everyone in the group would get it.” Gonzales hypothesis was that “Participants in a neighborhood texting intervention will report greater increases in neighborhood cohesion than participants in a non-texting control condition”.
Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
Gonzales used two different qualitative methods in this article, semi-structured in-depths interviews and an experimental test of texting intervention. The interviews were conducted with 33 people and lasted for about 1-2 hours. The participants were asked to describe their current texting behaviors as well as giving initial feedback and input on the intervention. One of the benefits of using this method is the opportunity to collect depletive answers from the participants and, by that, gaining a deeper understanding in why people think or feel in a specific way. Another benefit in this particular case was that the researcher could collect valuable input och feedback for the following experiment. A limitation with this method is that it is more time-consuming to collect the data (in contrast to, for example, a questionnaire) since you have to be actively present in every interview and spend some extra time afterwards transcript and process what has been said. Another challenge can be to ask the right questions, for example a leading question can affect the interviewee’s answer and thus the result.
The second qualitative method, the experimental test of texting intervention, included two public housing developments and lasted for 3 months. The participants were told to be a part of the direct conversation in the digital environment together with its neighborhood. All participants received a text twice a month from experimenters encouraging them to check in with their group. The intention of the experimentally test was to examine its effectiveness. A benefit of observing an experiment like this is that you actually get to see how it works in reality, even though it is somewhat moderated. A limitation worth mentioning is that the experiment only included two housing developments which I think is too few to draw any general conclusions. Also, the participants received $60 for participating in the experiment which might have affected how much they contributed. It is possible that some of the participants participated only for the money and would not have done it without the compensation.
What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
I learned that using complementary qualitative methods is a good way when doing these kinds of research. By conducting semi-structured interviews and including questions connected to the development of the following experiment as wells as leaving space for input and feedback, will make the implementation easier.
Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?
I think the main methodological problem with this study was the number of participants. 33 interviewees in the semi-structured interviews and two participating housing development in the experimental test is a rather small number to draw any general conclusions. An improvement could have been to include a bigger set of participants in order to present more accurate data. However, I do not think the main aim of this study was to draw any general conclusions but rather to see tendencies within this research area.
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Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
A case study could be described as a research strategy that seeks a deeper knowledge about the examined topic. What characterize a case study is the in-depth examination and research which is often done by focusing on one or a few cases. The results are more thoroughly and detailed in comparison to the results gained from a quantitative method such as a questionnaire. However, case studies often include combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods such as archives, interviews, questionnaires and observations.
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.
For this task I selected the paper The social strategy cone: Towards a framework for evaluating social media strategies by Robin Effing. The article was published in International Journal of Information Management, with an impact factor of 2.692. The aim of the article was to develop and present a framework for the analysis of social media strategies, using insights from a systematic literature review as well as case studies. When analyzing the article using Eisenhardt’s table I went through the eight steps that is presented. In the following part I am going to present the strengths and the weaknesses that I found.
As for the strengths, the first step “Getting started” is about defining a research question that helps keeping focus on the efforts, which I think Effing succeeds with. The main research question, “How can we evaluate the comprehensiveness of social media strategies in practice?”, is well defined and keeps the line of argument through the article. According to Eisenhardt, a number between four and ten cases usually is a good number when conducting a case study research. Effing manage to select nine good and relevant cases and analyzing the data as a within-case analysis which I think is a strength. A third strength with Effing’s article is the comparison with similar literature. Effing begins by doing a systematic literature review and uses them as good reference sources for his presented framework, together with the insights from the case studies (which also relies on the literature).
A weakness is the lack of comparison with conflicting literature. In this article, Effing is prone to only use articles that supports his presented framework. Another noticeable things is that Effing only uses qualitative methods. In Eisenhardt’s table it is recommended to combine qualitative and quantitative data. However, I would argue that in this case, only using qualitative methods was not a weakness since Effing thoroughly explained why he used the selected methods.
Gonzales L., A. (2015). Improving Health in Low-Income Communities With Group Texting. Available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.focus.lib.kth.se/doi/10.1111/jcom.12195/full [2016-09-28]
Effing, R. (2016). The social strategy cone: Towards a framework for evaluating social media strategies. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com.focus.lib.kth.se/science/article/pii/S0268401215000778 [2016-10-05]
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