torsdag 22 november 2012

Reflections on Theme 4 - Qualitative Methods


This week started off with a seminar regarding qualitative methods and was then followed by a lecture in “Qualitative methods based on concepting, tinkering and critique” by Ylva Ferneaus, whom was also one of the writers of the article that we read this week.

During the seminar we mainly discussed the qualitative methods that were used in the article that we chose by ourselves. The most common method, amongst the articles that were chosen by the people in my group, was conducting interviews or having focus groups, but other methods such as observation, experimental and content analysis were also quite common.  We also had a small discussion about the differences between content analysis and data analysis and why it’s important to separate the two.

As mentioned above we also had a lecture by Ylva Ferneaus who is a researcher in human-machine interaction. The first half of the lecture she talked more deeply about her article, and her background as a researcher. She explained the importance of semiotics in her work and why signs and symbols are interesting.

Since I had some troubles really grasping the article this was very helpful in understanding what the paper was actually about in a deeper sense. However, I still don’t really feel that I completely understand the motivation and purpose of the paper. It’s for sure an interesting topic but what are the expected results and goals with this type of product?

During the second half of the lecture we did have more of a dialog where we discussed some questions relevant to the paper. Some of the questions that we discussed were:

·      What was qualitative with the method (was there even a method)?
·      Was there any kind of empirical data?
·      Would statistics help in improving the article?
·      Is there a problem that no user study was conducted?

In this case we got to be more critical towards the papers approach and methods that were used. This at least helped me bit on the way of fully understanding the purpose and goal of the paper.



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