Theme 4: Qualitative methods

Select a media technology research paper that you argue is using qualitative methods in a good way. The paper should be of high quality. The following are examples of questions to discuss in your blog posting:

1. Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
2. What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

I chose the paper: Using multimedia to reveal the hidden code of everyday behaviour to children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) by Theresa Doyle & Inmaculada Arnedillo-Sánchez. The paper was published in the journal Computer & Education with an impact factor of 2.621. I choose this paper not only because I thought it is using qualitative methods in a good way but also because I can relate to the research since my little brother is diagnosed with ASD.

The paper describes a framework which was developed for carers (teachers and parents) to help them create personalized social stories for children with autistic spectrum disorders. It focuses on how technology can facilitate the implementation of this intervention by utilizing multimedia authoring tools. To do this Doyle & A-Sánchez make use of three online questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, telephone conversations, journal logs, field notes and postings on a discussion board to find evidence that could be corroborated. The benefit of using a variety of methods is that they obtained very valuable insight into the experiences of a small cohort of subjects and were able to develop a report that was both accurate and credible. However I think the most important method were the semi-structured interviews that gave them a lot of valuable information that a questioner wouldn't have picked up. Since the group of people in this research had very different needs I think the use of this kind of method was spot on and really gave the study valuable information that would have been hard to extract with another method. The limitation of this method is that it is very time consuming as it takes a lot of time to both collect and analyze the “results”.

From this paper I have learned not to just stick to one method but to broaden your horizon. Also it got me thinking about using discussion boards that helps with getting information that sometimes can be hard to collect since the persons you interview tend to forget things, therefore it could be a good complement to let them write down their thoughts on a forum.

It is hard to pin point a methodological problem of this study since they only discuss some of the methods they used and therefore don’t give any in depth data. But I would have liked them to use focus groups and not only the discussion boards. Then maybe they would have gotten more discussion going and with that maybe even better and more defined results in the end.