Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

For this week’s theme, I choose the paper “A Qualitative Research to Classifying Comments in Online Shops Based on Contents” by Hui Chen et al published in International Conference on Management and Service Science, 2009.  The paper focuses on what online retailers and product producers should pay attention to the advices and items written in comments system of online shops, try hard to mine useful knowledge and discover shortages, so as to improve their services or products effectively.

Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

The authors collected raw data from nine real online shops. Comments were collected from marking system, product reviews system, and business communication system, ranging from January, 2006 to December, 2008. The method mainly used in this research is Grounded Theory, which belongs to Qualitative Research. The basic idea of the grounded theory approach is to read a textual and "discover" or label variables and their interrelationships. An integrated Grounded Theory process includes three parts, and they are: Open Coding, Axial Coding, and Selective Coding. A limitation of this method is very time consuming. A benefit is that you get an in depth analysis of the online shops.

What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?

To me the grounded theory was a new aspect in qualitative research. The paper gives a short definition of this method and even mentions different parts of it. Nevertheless, I needed to research more detailed information about this method to fully understand it.

Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

The use of the qualitative research can be improved in several ways, especially in sample selection and research method. First, the chosen amount of online shops could have been increased. Nine online shops and 904 comments are a little deficient when compared to thousands of online shops and millions of comments all over the world. Furthermore, the paper is limited by its locality which makes it not quite clear if the findings would apply on other countries. All in all, this research would have benefited from a quantitative aspect.

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Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.

Business management case studies allow the reader to capture individual business functions (eg purchasing, production, sales, finance, human resources, etc.) on the basis of realistic depictions (usually to a fictitious company) in an overall context.

Use the "Process of Building Theory from Case Study Research" (Eisenhardt, summarized in Table 1) to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your selected paper.

I choose the paper “Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry” by Wu He et al published 2012. It is divided into 8 steps.

1. Getting started: the analysis starts with the definition of a research question. The research question is clearly stated in chapter 3.1: e.g. What patterns can be found from their Facebook sites respectively” 
2. Selecting cases: the selection of cases is neither theory nor hypothesis. The paper selects social media sites from three pizza chains.
3. Crafting instruments and protocols: Step 3 is about multiple data collection methods to strengthen grounding of theory by triangulation of evidence. The paper shows quite detailed information about data collecting and which methods are used. 
4. Entering the field: In this step, you should overlap data collection and analysis including field notes to speed analyses and reveal helpful adjustments to data collection. Field notes are described under “Findings” in the paper and it is multiplexed data. 
5. Analysing data: This is the within-case analysis to gain familiarity with data and preliminary theory generation. The analysis is done in the discussion part of the paper. It could have been more analysing and it is merged with the discussion. 
6. Shaping hypothesis: you search evidence for "why" behind relationships to build internal validity. In the results, the authors try to explain why the findings occur and how they connect to each other. 
7. Enfolding literature: This part is about comparison with conflicting or similar literature to build internal validity, or to sharpen generalizability. Comparison with other books, both conflicting and similar books is done throughout the whole paper. 
8. Reaching closure: The last step is the theoretical saturation when it is possible so it ends process when marginal improvement becomes small. No theoretical saturation is made in the paper, but there are some answers and contributions to the research questions asked in the beginning of the paper.

 To summarize, the choosen case study is written shortly and concisely but fulfils all the different steps along the process.