This week I chose
another paper from the journal of communication (I'm really starting to enjoy
this journal) titled "Making Sense of the News in a Hybrid Regime: How
Young Russians Decode State TV and an Oppositional Blog" by Florian
Toepfl.
Toepfl investigates how
young, well educated, urban russians decode different news items via the method
of semi-structured in-depth interviews. (sample size of 20.) He considers the
research to be exploratory and filling a gap that other, similar, research
endeavours has left, according to him.
When selecting
participants for the study he first selects according to criterion (educated
and urban) and then in a second stage for maximum variance in his sample
(political worldview, age, gender, course of study).
Using interviews as
data for research can be risky when using such a small sample-size, because it
might not be enough data to get any sort of statistical significance. In this
respect, Toepfl is lucky, or possibly insightful when designing the study.
Since he aspires to do exploratory research, his results – showing some clear
trends despite the sample size being small – does a good job of suggesting
areas that might be interesting for further research. (He suggests both
quantitative and qualitative approaches here.)
I thought it was
interesting to read about the study design, and how Toepfl – at least according
to me – managed to get a sample of people that shared all of the criteria he
had set, but still were all over the spectrum when it came to the answers he
got in the interviews. This is of course a balance act, carefully deciding on
how to sample respondents without compromising intellectual honesty and
objectivity. I think he did very well in this regard.
As pointed out in the
paper, one major problem is that, since Russia's media landscape is so
fragmented, the answers he got from respondents about their political world
views were not at all good indicators to which beliefs they actually held in
matter of fact issues. Toepfl explains this as showing how fragmented media
environment codifies ideologies and changes the significance of concepts like
"democratic", "liberal", "conservative",
depending on an individuals media habits.
Case study:
What is meant by <case study> is research into some phenomena in their context. Studying something as a part of a context is a good way of explaining and understanding how things happen in real life, because things are always a part of a context in one way or another.
What is meant by <case study> is research into some phenomena in their context. Studying something as a part of a context is a good way of explaining and understanding how things happen in real life, because things are always a part of a context in one way or another.
Hej Edvard! I like your simplistic explanation of the case study. But I think it is important to point out which context we are trying to explore. This is simply because everything is always in the context of something else but also that everything is in a mutlitude of contexts.
ReplyDeleteHej Ragnar! I agree that is is important to point out something about the context. I wrote such a brief definition because I was frustrated with how a concept with such fuzzy boundaries was defined by Eisenhardt on a level where it feels caught somewhere between a wish for generality and specificity. It's emphasized both how the context is important, but also how great it is to be able to go in with fresh eyes and discover relations and correlations that wouldn't be visible if one had theory-tunnel-vision turned on. But if the latter is the case, I feel like that implies the ability to change how you view the context of your study. As soon as you start to look at new variables and new data, shift focus, try new things and ideas, your scope is changed (and maybe, it could be argued, even the context?)
DeleteI don't think I'm very clear in my thoughts here. I guess maybe what I'm getting at is how a case study could be said to value context, get as much context as possibe, try different interpretations of context, and then choose an interpretation, a set of variables, som phenomena, to turn into data. This would then be opposed to a more laboratory-like study, where you want to build a context yourself and have complete control over your variables.
I honestly don't know, but it's fascinating to think about. Maybe I'm just aching for a definition that's general and wholly-encompassing at the same time, which seems hard for something that has to do with qualitative things. Humans that is.