Post theme 6

This week we learned about qualitative research and case study research. I began with selecting and reading a paper that used a qualitative method. After that I read the paper Eisenhardt where she described what case study research is and how it can be done. My learnings from Eisenhardt’s paper was then used to analyze another paper that used the case study method. Unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to discuss the given literature and my chosen papers with my friends before writing the blog post that was written before this theme. So I didn’t have a chance to hear my friends’ ideas and thoughts about this week’s theme. After going to the seminar I fortunately got the opportunity to listen to other students thoughts about this weeks theme, which gave me a bigger understanding.

I didn’t have much knowledge about case study prior to the theme so what I primarily learned during this week was what case study research is and how it can be conducted.  After reading the papers about case study I was a bit confused about what case study is because that case study can be many things, e.g. it can include both qualitative and quantitative methods but also just either of them, it can include several cases or just one. This broad description made it hard to find what the true core of what case study is.  But as usual the seminar gave me a bigger understanding. Leif Dahlberg described it as an event or object that has a “natural frame”, for example an organization. He also compared it with how doctors look at patients or police officers looks at a crime scene, a comparison I will take with me since it describes case study research well. What I thought was particularly difficult with case study research was to differentiate it with other research methods. But at the seminar I learned that in case study research the case is the subject for the research, not a hypothesis or theory. The case study should instead generate new hypothesis or theories that then can be tested with other research methods.

Of course I learned some about qualitative research but this was an area I was much more familiar with. What I did learn though was how the coding of the results found in the qualitative methods can be done, for example by using a software or by letting different researches interpret the results found.