This week Theme was about Qualitative methods and to better understand it we had a Seminar and a Lecture.
Seminar
During the Seminar we were divided into groups to discuss our paper choice and also to build up some concepts in the wiki page of the course.
As I was late for my Seminar Group I had the chance to participate in two different groups and once again it was very interesting to see how people’s choices vary a lot while selecting papers. A finding to me was the diary method in which the respondents take notes in a natural setting which makes data more reliable as the person has no other reason than to really express his or her opinion.
As Stefan (teacher) said it is very common to see papers using the triangulation technique, in which a mix of methods is used to validate the data from two or more different sources. Although this has leaded me to a question for next seminar: what is the difference between this technique and mixed research?
Lecture with Ylva Fernaeus
In the last post I wrote that hopefully in the seminar I would get the chance to understand the week’s article better. Guess what? The author was the one giving the Lecture about qualitative methods and also using her paper as kind of a case analysis.
It was nice to see how she and her colleague constructed the idea and based the theory in semiotics to come up with the concept of "ActDresses". The main idea was to show that robots are not very different from toys and people like making it more personal. They decided to illustrate that the use of different clothes, words and sequence of signs can be used to interact and control the robots behavior. The paper was only theoretical so in fact they only illustrated the idea with supposed scenarios instead of really building up prototypes.
A nice example Ylva gave of how this theory could work is that by changing the cover of your mobile you could get a different matching theme in the screen.
In the second part of the Lecture she discussed some questions with us about the methods used in the paper. Some of my notes:
1. What was qualitative about the method? In a qualitative method you try to get to the essence of your theme, and that was what they did. In a quantitative method you try to generate acknowledgment for measurement.
2. What is the empirical data in the paper? The illustrated scenarios could be empirical data. They were something created to try to explain that the theory was possible. In a design research design practice can be used as empirical data and sketches can be used as reflective practice.
3. How would statistics help making the paper better? It could have made the motivation more credible.
4. Is it a problem that there was no user study? It might be odd to think that a user study was not missing in the paper, but in fact it was not a problem. Because then the paper would not be made in a more theoretical base, and this would have changed the focus they wanted to prove.
5. Can this be considered objective knowledge? Yes, because it was grounded in theory in a sense that is not purely subjective.
To close this week theme another video from The Big Bang Theory (3x10) in which Sheldon has a very funny research Diary over an experiment he is doing in teaching physics to Penny. Enjoy!
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