Theme 6, Blog Post 1: Qualitative and Case Study Research 

My first chosen article, Exploring emotional expressions on YouTubethrough the lens of Media System Dependency theory, by Chei Sian Lee was published in 2011 in New Media & Society (Impact Factor 3,110). It aims to answer the following questions about user reactions to the death of celebrity Michael Jackson:

• What types of emotional responses are expressed on YouTube?
• What are the effects of time and gender on the emotional responses expressed on YouTube?
• What are other possible micro- and macro-level effects that may influence emotional responses expressed on YouTube?

1. Lee applies qualitative content analysis to a corpus of 3000 user comments on YouTube, written under 60 randomly chosen popular (having over 100 comments) videos, uploaded during a period of 3 weeks – between June 25^th (when Michael Jackson died) and July 16^th.  Lee states that a short period of time has been chosen because MSD is not as good at explaining long-term social phenomena. From the 6000 comments, 50 per video were randomly selected and information about the gender of their authors was extracted. When information about the gender of an author was not found, their comment was excluded from the sample. Comments that were not in English were also excluded.

The author employed 2 approaches in the study – direct content analysis (the use of prior research to develop the initial coding scheme before data analysis – and conventional content analysis – categories were derived from the data during the analysis.

2. I learned that qualitative content analysis is “a research method for the subjective interpretation of the content of text data through the systematic classifica­tion process of coding and identifying themes” (Lee, 2011:463) and that there are these two approaches in qualitative content analysis – direct content analysis and conventional content analysis, as well as the differences between them.

3. Initially, I thought the author should have selected a longer time period, but then a convincing argument was provided in favor of the author’s choice. I also thought that since it is hard to employ qualitative methods to large bodies of data, the author would have to gather a small sample, which was not the case – 3000 comments are a pretty impressive number. Lee has chosen an existing coding scheme with 19 categories developed by Macias et al (2005), but then actually applied it to 10% of the selected comments and adopted it to the corpus of the study – some categories were merged and others that bear no relevance to the study were dropped. A total of 10 categories were included in the coding scheme. Lee has also tested the reliability of the final coding scheme – the result stated is 93%, which is above the minimal 80% (Raffe et al, 1998). Overall, I could not find anything that could be improved with the study. 

Lee, however, does point out that further research should be done on the topic – in relation to the death of other celebrities and on other social media websites. The author also encourages others to replicate the study, taking into consideration not just the gender, but also the age, geographical location and personality of the reponsndents.  

4. After reading Eisenhardt’s article, I came up with this brief, but not at the least complete explanation: A case study is a research strategy tightly linked to the qualitative and/or quantitative empirical data it analyzes, with a carefully selected real-life case, which aims to construct a novel, testable and empirically valid theory that can closely mirror reality.

5. The case study I have chosen, Gotta catch ’em all: structure,agency and pedagogy in children’s media culture by Sefton-Green and Buckingham, was published in Media, Culture & Society (Impact factor: 1,128) in 2003.

Compared to Eisenhardt’s step-by-step article, Sefton-Green and Buckingham do not specify their choice of research method, not is there a clear research sample. They just talk about the whole “Pokémon” phenomenon, devoting some space to every element of it – from its profitability, to the films, to the computer games, the card game, the toys, the children who are into Pokémon, etc. Their use of academic sources is occasional. They do not come up with a new theory or even make attempts of constructing one. Sefton-Green and Buckingham just don’t agree that the relationship between the activity of the children and Pokémon’s producer, Nintendo, can be described in terms of the opposition between structure and agency, but rather turn to the notion of pedagogy to provide a more plausible explanation of that relationship.