Theme 6: Qualitative and Case Study research

Qualitative paper: Why do not satisfied consumers show reuse behavior? The context of online games (Tseng & Wang 2013).

This paper is about satisfied customers tendencies of reuse behavior is the specific context of online games. Research like this has been done before but very seldom in the context of a virtual community or an online environment, which is why I believe the authors choose to combine different research methods when gathering data (both qualitative and quantitative). The qualitative aspect of the research was the fact that they conducted two focus group meetings based on several observations that they made prior to both the group meetings and the recruiting. The results from the focus groups laid the foundation to a quantitative questionnaire from which they extracted some interesting statistics about reuse behavior.

The benefits of implementing a (or several) focus group(s) is that you get a chance to study certain questions in-depth with your target group (Wikipedia 2013). The subjects also get a chance to speak freely, and if you are lucky this might turn into a giving discussion that will benefit your research in some way. Of course, the person that is conducting the research has to be skilled at promoting a giving discussion. The focus groups performance will only be as good as the moderators ability to motivate discussion, in my opinion. In the paper I read the authors went into the focus group meeting without a clear hypothesis about their research, which was kind of an eye-opener to me. The hypothesis was defined from the subjects answers and after that they designed a questionnaire with close-ended questions in order to collect quantitative, statistical data.  I also learned that it seems to be quite common that you get paid as a participant in a focus group, and not only with pastries and coffee. If i were to give some constructive criticism on their qualitative data gathering it would be the fact that they only recruited one female participant and partly base their hypothesis about females in online games in general from that one participant. Since the subjects of the focus groups were recruited through an online forum, I think that they could have done a deeper search for female gamers in order to get more equal or equitable results.

Case study

A case study is a qualitative research design that is applied to a specific case, e.g. a company, a smaller group of people or some software (as was the case in the paper I read). A case study could for example be used to see if a design or a prototype will be successful in the chosen case. A case study requires an in-depth description of the entity being evaluated and all its circumstantial factors such as cultural norms, the demographic of the area, community values and motives (Writing@CSU 2013). It can for example be used to illustrate a concept, to pilot test a hypothesis, or as a source of critique.

Case study paper: Understanding users’ behavior with software operation data mining (Pachidi, Spruit, Van de Weerd 2013).

The authors start off well by defining some clear research questions and by explaining how they will use their knowledge from a literature study to design a prototype for data mining in a Dutch software company’s database over customers and their behavior while using a specific application (Exact Online). A natural byproduct of this is of course that every customer (every case) is theoretically useful when gathering results. They also use several data mining algorithms (for the same data clusters) at the same time to see which type will work best. In my opinion this strengthens their evidence (Eisenhardt 1989). One weakness might be that they mainly looked a quantitative data (big data clusters) and qualitative data was partly overlooked. When analyzing the results of the case study they compared different data clusters with each other and different data mining algorithms, and their results, mutually. Thus I argue that they indeed search for cross case patterns to a high extent. One thing that differs the paper from table 1 in Eisenhardt (1989) is that the authors did a literature study of conflicting and similar studies prior to their case study. They also construct their hypothesis in an earlier stage. The case study itself was only a part of the research process to test their prototype. In the end they draw some conclusions on how the prototype better could have been implemented and they ask for future research where the prototype is used on different kind of data as to reach closure. They also suggest that the prototype should be evaluated in terms of usability to a higher extent, as they did not put a lot of effort into that aspect.

Resources

Eisenhardt, M., 2013. Building Theories from Case. , 14(4), pp.532–550.

Pachidi, S., Spruit, M. & Van de Weerd, I., 2014. Understanding users’ behavior with software operation data mining. Computers in Human Behavior, 30, pp.583–594. Available at: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0747563213002884 [Accessed December 11, 2013].

Tseng, F.-M. & Wang, C.-Y., 2013. Why do not satisfied consumers show reuse behavior? The context of online games. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), pp.1012–1022. Available at: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0747563212003408 [Accessed December 13, 2013].

Wikipedia, Focus Groups - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_group [Accessed December 11, 2013].

Writing@CSU. Bronwyn Becker, Patrick Dawson, Karen Devine, Carla Hannum, Steve Hill, Jon Leydens, Debbie Matuskevich, Carol Traver, and Mike Palmquist.. (1994 - 2012). Case Studies. Colorado State University. Available at http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=60. [Accessed December 13, 2013].