Hit the bell if you know! | Theme 4: Qualitative methods

This week theme is about qualitative methods and the task is to write about my impressions on this text. Also i had to choose a paper that I consider is using qualitative methods in a good way to reflect on it. My choice was "Measuring Organizational Cultures: A Qualitative and Quantitative Study across Twenty Cases"
from Hofstede, Geert".

Impressions about the text
The title of the text is very intriguing (Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses) but the introduction was a huge question mark to me.  Maybe I had this feeling because of my background in social communication which is not even close to HCI and technology in this sense. 

I must confess that until the case section I was not really sure what the article was about. The concepts for a person that is out of the area are very hard to follow. I think that there is a “rule” for writing that everybody should be able to understand it.  Not quite sure if I agree with it, because for some people outside the field this is just something they couldn’t understand in an easy way by the first time anyway. So what is the point in making it too simple? But still. 

The cases exemplified the idea in a very nice way, but even so I still quite don’t understand the “experiment”. Maybe it will be easier after the discussions in the Seminar. I get the point of making some devices look like humans, like the Disney characters in which for example a lion would have eyebrows. But I really didn’t get the point of for example the comic signs for a vacuum robot (?).

Moreover I liked the pictures to illustrate the idea and the structure is very coherent. I also like the referencing system of having a number while quoting, makes the read flow.

Impressions about the paper of my choice
I think this article makes use of a mixed research method, because it uses a quantitative questionnaire plus in-depth interviews. The article is from 1990, had 560 citations from Web of Science (which is an average of 25 per year) and it is from the journal Administrative Science Quarterly which has an impact factor of 4.212.

The theme is not related to technology itself but more on how different cultural aspects can have an impact in organizations. In my opinion when developing a product, like an internal social network to a company, one should be able to analyze the different impacts in each group of users, trying to make it as much user friendly as possible. Also how to be able to offer a product that is feasible to the organizational culture and how to make the top management support your idea that most of the times will be breaking an old structure, making people adapt to a new system/tool.

The paper uses in-depth interviews with employees of IBM company that later lead to a quantitative questionnaire based on the main thoughts suggested in the qualitative method. I like the composition of the methods because usually a qualitative method gives you support to draw quantitative questions. Although I am not sure that having only IBM  and other two country companies as respondents could have had an impact on the results, representing a limitation in the model.

In my opinion a qualitative method is good to underline some questions that can be further explored. When having a mixed research method the results of a qualitative can later be used to explain some of the quantitative results as well, reinforcing the hypothesis. In my opinion the qualitative method is also better to be used when you have a specific and not to broad target group.


To close this post one video from a sequence of that the mobile Sony Xperia has made showing different users groups in a focus group interacting with the product. For your laughs!