Theme 4, Qualitative Methods

Brief summary of the paper I read

I read the paper "Coming of age with the internet: A qualitative exploration of how the internet has become an integral part of young people's lives". It is an explorative study of how the view college students in the US have been shaped by growing up in the same time as the Internet was introduced in the western world(Mcmillan, Morrison, 2006). The paper also look at how the Internet now is integrated into their daily lives. It was published in 2006 and  examines personal narratives writen by student in the years 1998 to 2000 about how interactive media have affected their lives. The students where also asked to reflect on how they use interactive media today.

The Method

The method that is used in the paper is a qualitative analysis of written material, that could be called a document analysis. The authors argue that the method in this case provides better data to analyse than oral interviews because subjects have more time to reflect on their past and current experiences. As opposed to oral interviews where some of that information may be lost. I follow this argument and think that even though more non-verbal information might be communicated in a face to face setting, it might be hard to analyse this information in a systematical way.

How was the data analysed

The analysis of the data was built up around an itterative systematical coding and sorting of the texts. First they where sorted uppon passages relevant to the research question, then they where broken down into themes and topics, and finaly more selectively examined to create a picture what was found in the first two stepes.

My reflections on the method

The method is in my opinion well balanced and thought through, and I feel that they have found some themes that are relevant to the papers discussion. The paper showed me in a really clear way how qualitative analy sis can be performed in a very systematical way, even though the data was personal narratives that didn't follow a strict patern. I also belive that written data, just as the authors argue, might in many cases provide more information than what can be extracted from a face to face interview.

Design research

I think that the paper illustrates design research in a good way. It defines the goal of the designs as an programming interface that can be understood by "ordinary" people and thats doesn't require a screen to illustrate the actions of the programmer. Whith these clear goals the research prosses then becomes a question of trying to achieve these concepts on a technical level,  which makes it possible to evaluate the research. The study can't hovewer tell us if the approaches suggested are going to be successfull or not, just that they are doable.

The question i have about design research is how you find the balance between potential and novelty in a desing? The ultimate design is of course something in wich you can se a potential(for example commercial) and also is very new and unheard of. But you could think of designs that are not very innovative but have a great potential in improving something, or resulting in a succesfull product. On the other hand you could think of the designs that are very new and innovative, but that you can't realy see how it would be usefull in the "real" world. Where do you find the balance between these two?

References

Fernaeus, Y. & Jacobsson, M. 2009. "Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses".  Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction.  

Mcmillan, S. & Morrison, M. 2006 "Coming of age with the internet: A qualitative exploration of how the internet has become an integral part of young people's lives" New Media & Society.