Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research - postreflection

This week we were asked to find a paper that wrote about a qualitative method. We were also asked to find a paper that used a case study.  Since I found one paper that fulfilled both of these requirements, I chose just that one. Just as the last few weeks, I feel frustration over the fact that we do not get any guidance about how to find good papers. I really think that this course should include guidance on how to find a good paper that is related to the subject that you are looking for. Especially since it is usually easy to find pro’s and con’s for different qualitative/quantitative methods, but so much harder to find information about how to find good papers online.

Despite the fact that we do not get any good information about how to find the papers, I think that it is good to read a lot of different papers. It is especially good to be critical when reading the papers, and that we have to find parts that could have been done another way. This is since it is always parts that could have been done differently, and therefore maybe affected the results of the study. In some papers, I consider that it is more difficult to find the “flaws”, but in the end it is always something that could have been done different.

When discussing during the seminar, I got the impression that a lot of the papers used interview as the qualitative method. In general, this seems to be one of the most common one. During the seminar we also talked a bit about how different ways of conducting the interview might have an effect on the result. Some authors who did interview chose to do them differently, so they conducted one interview face-to-face while another one was conducted on skype and a third one was conducted on the phone. It was therefore harder to see if the difference in the answers were because of the different ways of the interviews or if it were because of something else. We also talked a bit about how to do when interviewing children, since it is a lot different than interviewing an adult. The most important I think is to, before the interview, really think through who are the person that you are going to interview, and how should you act. I think one of the biggest challenges with interview is that you can not do exactly the same way on every interview because every person you interview is different from the rest.