Theme 6: Qualitative and Case Study Research

The Nature of Cyberbullying, and Strategies for Prevention

For this week's subject was the first paper I chose The nature of cyberbullying, and strategies for prevention by Slonje, Smith and Frisén. The paper was first published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior  in 2013, the journal is an well known within its field and has an impact factor of 2,067. The purpose of the paper is to highlight, discuss and draw conclusions from a growing phenomenon - bullying online on the Internet or cyberbullying. 

To be able to get knowledge and understanding of the situation did the authors conduct nine semi structured in-depth interviews around 30-45 minutes each with students from different background and education. The participants had all experience from cyberbullying, both as victims and/or perpetrators, further was also one bystander included in the study. Worth mentioning is that the interviews focused on many different aspects of cyberbullying, including: type of bullying, victims' knowledge of the perpetrators, the secrecy around it and the power imbalance. 

The conducted methodology, semi constructed interviews, both have advantages and limitations. For me is it the ultimate form of interview since it is based on a structure, so the interview always keeps focus, while the the same time room for creativity and inventiveness because the interviewer do not necessarily have to stay on a manuscript. While the conduced methodology form can have many further advantages, like depth, can it still consist of limitations. One big source of wrongful information can come from the fact that the persons interviewed feel like they are not anonymous and thereby do not answer the questions truthfully. Another limitation of conducting interviews in general is that it is very time consuming, and it is not possible to get input from many different sources to get a broader understanding. 

I think the paper had many good arguments, and I felt like the authors had a clear focus all the way from the abstract to the conclusion. They used the interviews in a good way to maximize their analyzation-part and discussed the question with support from the data collected from the interviews. I do however believe that there were some things that the authors could have been done better. For example was the number of victims overrepresented of the interview participants, seven out of nine had been victims, while only three of the nine had been perpetrates. To get a better understanding do I believe that the authors should look more why the perpetrates act the way they do, and for doing that should they have interviewed more perpetrators. A key receipt to treat a problem is to find the root and get an understand of the root before starting to find a cure.

Case Studies 

A case study is a research strategy that aims to give an investigation a deeper knowledge and more power to whats being stated. Case studies do not necessarily have to include specific methods of collection empirical data, but can combined various methodologies. Both qualitative and quantitative results may be achieved in a case study through, interviews, questionnaires, observations and archives. Eisenhardt most elegantly states in his text: Building Theories from Case Study Research, that the definition of a case study is: 

"The case study is a research strategy which focuses on understanding the dynamics present within single settings."

Cross-Pollination of Information in Online Social Media: A Case Study on Popular Social Network

To be able to get a better understanding of what a case study really is, I chose a paper from the journal: IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, a trustworthy journal with an impact factor of: 3,381. The article I chose is called Cross-Pollination of Information in Online Social Media: A Case Study on Popular Social Network and is written by Jain, Rodrigues, Magno, Kumaraguru and Almeida. The authors uses the case study methodology to analyze how the users of social media not only focuses on one platform but has active accounts on many. The study is to analyze how information from three popular social media platforms (YouTube, Flickr and Foursquare) diffuses on Twitter, the most popular microblogging service today.

To be able to make a proper evaluation of how the authors conducted their case study did I take inspiration from Eisenhardt's idea of how the process of building theory from case study research should look. I believe that Jain et al. started their paper really good since they had a clear purpose, an interesting subject to write about and a formulated description of what they wanted to do. Further did the authors have much literature to lean on while analyzing their data and referenced in a clear and constructive way. The biggest weakness of the text according to Eisenhardt's theory was that the text lacked multiple data collection methods, something that clearly makes the text lose impact in the academic society.