Theme 6 - Qualitative and case study research

Qualitative methods

The paper [1] chosen is about Educational magic toys, meaning toys which have for example digital screens showing virtual objects. There are numerous possibilities to use this in an educational way, for example you can have puzzles and other funny interactions in them. In the research, both teachers and children were participants. It was focused on the early education of children (Abstract and 1. Introduction).

The paper itself describes the methods for the qualitative research pretty clear ([1] Table 3). Content analyses were done on children’s opinions and descriptive analyses were done on children's cognitive attainment (abilities), both in interview forms ([1] 2.6 Data analyses).

It seems like the examination of children’s opinions were conducted in a way that made it easy to interact with the children, they could freely express their opinion making it much more precise than for example just asking ‘yes’ or ‘no questions. The number of children participants were 33 ([1] 2.2 Sample), so even though qualitative methods can often be limited by a smaller number of participants than in the quantitative methods, in this case it was as many as in the quantitative methods in the same paper. In general, a disadvantage with the qualitative method however is that it can be quite time consuming [2].

In the examination of children's cognitive attainment, the children’s appearance description of the AR in the toy were better than the extensive description (extensive meaning the child’s comments or thoughts about the object in the AR, other than the appearance) ([1] 3.3). Less data on the extensive description could be seen as a limitation, using another method could have perhaps gotten more data in this category.

[1]
Rabia M. Yilmaz, Educational magic toys developed with augmented reality technology for early childhood education, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 54, January 2016, Pages 240-248, ISSN 0747-5632, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.07.040.
[2]
ACET, Inc. (2013).
Selecting an evaluation: Qualitative,
quantitative, and mixed method approaches.
Minneapolis, MN.

Case studies

I would say that Case studies are way of conducting research on one or several cases based on both observation and use of quantitative and/or qualitative method ([1] p.534).

I chose a paper [2] which conducted a research on mobile game design for elders. Two case studies were used in the paper. The first case study was about a Game book which was sort of a reference book where details and video/images about a specific game was shown and the participants chose a scoring of the games. The second study was about a game which the participants played and evaluated.
The paper have reference to support one of the hypothesis in the paper, that the elderly often like traditional games which include games which can be played without the aid of a device. In the paper, the hypothesis was tested and verified in the study as the participants liked card games.
I think one weakness of the paper can be that the hypothesis are not clearly defined in the paper, there are results of the hypothesis though.

[1]
Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building Theories from Case Study Research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532-550.
[2]
Túlio Teixeira Cota, Lucila Ishitani, Niltom Vieira Jr., Mobile game design for the elderly: A study with focus on the motivation to play, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 51, Part A, October 2015, Pages 96-105, ISSN 0747-5632, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.04.026.