Week #6 - Qualitative and case study research (pre-reflection)

Week6 - Pre-reflection

Select a media technology research paper that is using qualitative methods. The paper should have been published in a high quality journal, with an “impact factor” of 1.0 or above. 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?

Selected paper: Carey L. Higgins-Dobney and Gerald Sussman (2013). “The growth of TV news, the demise of the journalism profession”. 

The paper describes a paradigm shift in the news media coverage in the US, where more and more news hours are being produced by less and less staff members, by new technology and by a more multitasked news staff, as well as cut-downs in manpower (full-time employment reduced to part-time). They argue that this “seriously” weakens investigative news reporting as well as the overall news quality. They conduct the research by a study of how the media corporations spend their resources, as well as do qualitative interviews by staff members of these corporations. “We spoke with long-time newsworkers about their experiences, which invoked such issues as technology-based layoffs, reductions in status (full-time to part-time), reduced real income and benefits for crew, multitasking without commensurate pay, disregard for professional knowledge and experience, and abrupt dismissals of long-term talent and other employees.”

I found the piece very interesting, yet not at all controversial - this was just another stone in the wall of a rapidly changing media landscape. What I did find interesting was the layout of the study - it differed quite a lot from the rigid IMRAD structure of intro->background->literature->theory->method->results->conclusion structure I’ve almost always seen so far. This study, albeit based on IMRAD, had a more “loose” dramaturgy, which made it easier to read, but harder to skim through. I don’t know if it’s just a matter of preferences, but it felt less “research-y” when the chapters were named like the titles in a book (eg. "The Axeman Cometh"), rather than the conventional way. Also - a lot of the conclusions were made through the interviews they made, but the only thing apparent to the reader was loosely grabbed quotes, which indicate that one should be critical of how they’re being used - as well as who they’re interviewing.

“What we found through research, personal experience in the newsroom, and interviews with other members of the TV news industry in Portland (and elsewhere) is that there is a close connection between the economics and the new technologies of news production on the one hand and the reduction of news staff, the declining quality of news, and deteriorating public trust in the TV news function.”

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Read the following article:

• Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building Theories from Case Study Research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532-550.

Select a media technology research paper that is using the case study research method. The paper should have been published in a high quality journal, with an “impact factor” of 1.0 or above. Your tasks are the following:

1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what a case study is.
2. 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.

A case study is a type of research in which the empirical data comes from studying defined cases. It can be quantitative as well as qualitative, or a mixture of the two methods. G. Thomas proposes the definition as “Case studies are analyses of persons, events, decisions, periods, projects, policies, institutions, or other systems that are studied holistically by one or more methods. The case that is the subject of the inquiry will be an instance of a class of phenomena that provides an analytical frame — an object — within which the study is conducted and which the case illuminates and explicates.” (Thomas, 2011)

The research I’ve chosen using the case study method is called “Policy failure or moral scandal? Political accountability, journalism and new public management” by Monika Djerf-Pierre, Mats Ekström, and Bengt Johansson, all from University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and was published in journal Media, Culture & Society, with an IF of 1.092.

The paper does a case study where it tries to “examine how journalism does ‘accountability work’ in a political setting marked by new public management”. The case is the Carema scandal which had the public light shined on it in 2011. The authors do this by analyzing 156 news items, publish time ranging from 1 October 2011 to 31 December 2011. The sources were Dagens Nyheter (86 articles), Aftonbladet (32 articles), Rapport (21 reports) and Nyheterna (17 reports).

The step-by-step “guide” Eisenhardt, K. M is followed thoroughly by Djerf-Pierre, M. et al, but of course focuses more on some steps, and less on others. They do a thorough data collection and analysis, and bases most of their research on this. Of course, they have some literature research as well, but this is not at all as important. They only use data from four sources, as previously mentioned - and while these media do have different political stances, one could argue that they miss out on a lot of views by not taking into account the myriad of alternative news sources, such as editorial blogs, pundit blogs, and micro blogs - all a part of the new branch of journalism, and rapidly forming the discussion in the public sphere. The thesis is strenghtened by the fact that they use newspapers as well as news shows. One weakness, which the authors mention in their discussion, is that they’re not certain their conclusions can be applied to a more general discussion on how public accountability is a concern of journalism - since they only investigated the Carema case.

References

• Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building Theories from Case Study Research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532-550.
• Monika Djerf-Pierre, Mats Ekström, and Bengt Johansson. (2013). “Policy failure or moral scandal? Political accountability, journalism and new public management” Media Culture Society 2013 35: 960
• Carey L. Higgins-Dobney and Gerald Sussman (2013). “The growth of TV news, the demise of the journalism profession”.
• G. Thomas (2011) A typology for the case study in social science following a review of definition, discourse and structure. Qualitative Inquiry, 17, 6, 511-521