Comments

Theme 1: Pre reflection (Lucy)
I like the way you put things.
"Russell argues that real or true knowledge is extremely hard to identify (if not impossible?) since people's knowledge is based on sense-data, which varies from individual to individual"
Who is to say that a crazy person's view is not a real view more less THE real view of how things go down. It is quite impossible to establish a "true reality" as reality as it seems is limited to the dimensions of each individual.
 Moreover- what makes a "crazy person" a crazy person? Where's the threshold of insanity and who defines it..?

Theme 1: (Jenny Silen)
I was not entirely sure of what question number 3 was about until I read your blog- post:
"When Adorno and Horkheimer talks about the by the new media, a concept they are highly critical of,  what they refer to seems to be the mass production of cultural material, such as soap operas, cartoons and stunt movies etc.  It is the easy consumption of popular culture on TV, radio and movie theatres that creates passive and stupid consumers (people)".

Thank you! It seems all these points and questions and answers overlap and cross over each other. I was also intrigued by your comment:
 "I cannot help but wonder if this would be the case also today; is the branding value so important that you need to keep advertising your products even though you cannot produce them, and people cannot buy them."

I recently saw an advertisement in the subway that pretty much stated that: "in the US customer service comes in place 1, in Sweden customer service comes in at place 55". They go on encouraging people to not just try to blindly strive for a cheaper price. When a company promises too much of what they can't deliver, weather it be prices below their own threshold of income or production they quickly turn over and are bankrupted. One fine example is OnOff. In a state where prices are pushed, quality (in variety) and customer service suffers the most. So then the queation remains: are we here to satisfy robotic and static, temporary needs. and is that sufficient? Or should we concentrate on the fact that we communicate with human beings- entities with limitations and specific needs, trying to limit our production to actually fit the end consumer?

Theme 2: Pre reflection (Anna Tjörnebro)

Interesting that you brought out Cosmo and Elle and the Russel theories about "what's real" as that could certainly be a relevant question at hand..
I would also like to fill in that today we're part of the group feeding mass deception to ourselves. We thrive on the simplified ideas of a less advanced world, and as we have opinions of our own we feed them to the mass deception- blob, that in term tells us what our opinions are. It's like a neverending paradox and yet it makes sense...
Somehow I can't help but feel like we reach fr a myth (because just as you wrote- we're not ready to take responsibility for ourselves and so we push the responsibility of the explanations on something else- like a myth). Isn't mass deception a myth? And if so and we still live the mass-deception myth- what does that make us..?

Theme 3 pre reflection: (Iuliia Zabavina)
It's an interesting article you've chosen. Did you know that links between on human beings' physical age and social capital has been established? Basically- the more social capital your environment has, the longer you live.
Social capital is based on things you do together, like talkoo- work. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkoo#Talkoot). Small villages might have more social capital than larger communities- but it has still nothing to do with a community. For instance, being a member of church is not social capital. Social capital refers not to "us and them" but rather "we and we". So the question "do you trust people around you?" may be tiny as a sentence, but remarkably significant.

Your take on theory seems so much more logical than mine. Thank you.

Theme 3 pre reflection:(christoffer carlsson)
Your layout for the different kinds of theories are very clear. I've been wondering myself how to implement everything into a paper.. As you commented on the article of you chose:
"the lack of analysis is a limitation to this theory. I would like to see some data or facts regarding the change over time (yearly) in number of patients treated at the unit, the number of patients surviving and not at least the change of the actual noise level at the unit."
I also found the same thing in the article I chose. The thing is, however, that if one starts on a new research topic and can't refer to past research, there is no way one can make just conclusions to one's hypotheses... and so the "perfect plan for a fully -ok article" can only be "standing on the shoulders of giants".

In several research papers I also found that an analysis or summing of what the authors found or concluded was missing- as if they wanted to distance themselves from claiming any responsibility to their work.

Theme3 re reflection: (oscar friberg)
Interesting topic. As you day, there' s no way you could define the political outcome of the usage of Twitter. However, if one monitors the link between this usage and political popularity one can establish findings that the reader may interpret freely.
Not so long ago BBC published a documentary on the link between ruling governments and the price of onions in India- and how the price of onions seemed to directly correlate to how people found their government.

Theme 3 pre reflection: (Zahra Al Houaidy)
It's interesting how he manages to summarize the data he's collected and dared to make a hypothesis or at least a vague theory. In many articles it's the other way around- data is collected, presented and yet no conclusions are drawn... possibly for fear of being proven wrong. It's a hard topic and a large one. I can see that it has to be very hard to come to any conclusion at all.

Theme 3 post reflection: (Zahra Al Houaidy)
The comment:
"any finding is only data and it only becomes part of a theory if there is reasoning of why." is interesting when writing about our next topic in Theme 4: Quantitative research. This distinguishes quite clearly the difference between quantitative and qualitative research (even benefits and drawbacks of both).
I've also found that the conclusions in several papers are, in fact, inconclusive, as the authors don't seem to take any responsibility for their study in fear of being wrong.

Theme 3 post reflection: (Cem Atilgan)
I agree with you on that the clarification on what theory is and how searching for theory methods when analyzing an article became MUCH more understandable after discussing it in the seminar group and trying to match theories to a specific article.
I kept subconsciously thinking about a new term for the theory method we came up with in our group- all day...what DO you call a theory method that puts people in a strange environment with strange tools and watch them slowly learn how to cope with the tools they are given based on only their own intuition..? Late that night I came up with "Theory of cognitive sensory intuition"... (theory of cognitive intuition= why we know something without knowing it, just based on intuition and instinct)
I now have a headache :D

Theme 4: (Zahra Al Houaidy)
They focused on the issue of computer usage as a possible contributing factor to glaucoma. However, there are lots of other factors that weigh heavier, such as genes, physical traumas and/or other diseases (caused by lack of education or lifestyle habits). They did not, as it seems, really take into consideration who compromises their health as to how much they use computers. For instance, one factor they mention as a failure was the fact that many of the heaviest computer users were, in fact, computer engineers, with high education and somewhat good standard of living. Furthermore they mention that they only asked people at two separate companies where they assumed computer usage was residing. They wrote "next time we'll focus more on completely random people with computer skills". They found out, though, that about 5,5% of heavy users that were male had tendencies for refraction errors or glaucoma. No women! :D

Theme 4: (Aikaterini Kourti)
Drawing a " map" of an article's structure in an old-school "mind-mapping" way turned out to clarify yet some perspectives that I had not considered before. Establishing links between hypotheses, outcomes and results and marking the paths with possible theories strips an article of all the plus-minus BS that one so often can find in a text, and states how valid and stable the summing of a study is (not in all cases, naturally).
Your text was so clear and such a model-example for the seminar. I didnät get all of it at the seminar, but the more I come back to it now the more clear it gets.

Theme 5: (Mimmi Abrahamsson)
I guess there hasn't been that much on the robotics-for-consumers in the commercial field, but there have been a number of studies on this in medical science for example. Since they measure human response to roborics, it's also been a topic that's caught the interest of psychology studies.
Placing it on the market for consumption is a brilliant (and yet horrifying) idea, and I'm sure we'll hear more about it in the near future, as more companies with large budgets are looking to increase their income.

Theme 5: (on comments on my own blog)
Sorry, guys, not checking comments until now.
I believe you misunderstand me, I mean to say that the "expected result may be a failure". Not the result in itself. One might find results that open doors to further examination that in the beginning wasn't even considered.
This is why I'm more up for qualitative research (and apparently design research as well)- I don't like to go in to prove a point. I relish the challenge of getting results that you didn't expect (or the significance of a result you weren't concentrated on).
If one goes in with quantitative research methods, knowing what answers you're looking for, not getting those answers at all might make the survey fall apart. Then you have to start all over and try to analyze (as you do in qualitative research) new things to look for.

Theme 6: Edvard Ahlsén
Lot's of what you describe I also found in my paper. I often find that the summing at the end is actually inconclusive though at first glance it seems that the hypotheses and conclusions seemed somewhat controlled. After dissecting a paper and critically reviewing it, as you have, one finds the shortcomings of the research. I have a sneaky suspicion that this is a growing phenomenon.

Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

 I chose a research paper called ”Simpatico in store retailing: How immigrant Hispanic emic interpret U.S. store atmorpherics and interations with sales associates” by D.Fowler, S.Wesley, M.Vazquez, 2006.

The article was published in Journal of Business.

The article explores the experiences of Hispanic consumers (shoppers) in the U.S. The areas of focus are those that have recorded the fastest growing Hispanic population throughout the last decades (from 1994- about present). These include states such as: South- and North Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas. The people studied were recent immigrants or first generation U.S. citizens of Hispanic decent.

The qualitative method used is “focus groups”. Instead of picking out random people to answer an arbitrary questionnaire, specific people were chosen (on an objective factor basis) and studied with more focus on each individual. After that, the data was collected and analyzed, as usual.

In this case, however, the data was deeper, heavier and less subject to speculation, as the focus groups made each participant elaborate on their answers, leaving very little room for additional interpretation.
I learned that there are more than a few approaches to qualitative research. I chose the article because the method used was different from what I had read earlier. Instead of asking light questions from a large number of people, the authors had gathered random people and interviewed them instead, receiving just as much data but from a completely different perspective. The number of people interviewed in these focus groups is never revealed, leaving a bit too little to trust in the article.
(Since it does provide the reader with a table of percentage of people in categories one could calculate an approximation of the quantity.)

I wouldn’t call it a problem, but rather an improvement of the study would be to continue it on a larger scale, inviting more people to participate in the focus groups and also do the same study with only a simple questionnaire on the side- and then summerizing the findings of the two studies.
In this article the findings were that lots of Hispanics felt poorly treated by customer service because of the language barrier. One parameter that I was more interested in was the influence of the atmorpheric design in retail stores (smell, colour, sound- overall sensory impacts). That was introduced at the beginning of the article but never received further (sufficient)attention.

1. A case study is a qualitative research method strongly based on a selection of previous research. The purpose of qualitative research is to strengthen already existing knowledge , used especially in contemporary environment studies such as social studies.

2. As I had a hard time finding a technical case study article (and I didn’t want to pick up the same article I chose for theme 2- which was a clear study case article) I went ahead and chose a case study article on human behaviour, which I personally find is too often neglected in the technical aspects:

“Behavior and perception of using safety gear among commercial landscapers: A pilot study”; G.Kearney, X.Xu, A.Hight, T.Arcury, Journal od Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, 2013

1. The background and reason for the study is described by previously collected  data.
2. A questionnaire was given out to the test subjects that qualified for the study (had sufficient knowledge, education, licenses etc.) based on already existing theories.
3. Even though the selected cases were picked on a quite random basis, they did not vary enough (the instances were a bit limited)- which gave interesting results and made way to new theories and hypotheses at the stage of conclusion- which they acknowledged.

References:

[“Building Theories from Case Study Research”,  Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, 1989”]

[”Simpatico in store retailing: How immigrant Hispanic emic interpret U.S. store atmorpherics and interations with sales associates” by D.Fowler, S.Wesley, M.Vazquez, 2006]

[“The Case Study as a Research Method”, https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ssoy/usesusers/l391d1b.htm]

[“Behavior and perception of using safety gear among commercial landscapers: A pilot study”; G.Kearney, X.Xu, A.Hight, T.Arcury, Journal od Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, 2013]

Theme 5: Post reflection

I realized the first article I picked out at the beginning of this course was actually somewhat classified as design research. This might explain why I found it a bit harder to dissect into the patterns of analysis that we were supposed to use. At the first lecture Ylva Ferneaus explained and talked about what might be missing in design research papers, such as Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses, a research paper written by herself and colleagues. A few of the typical things that might be missing turned out to be, quite naturally, the things I had a hard time finding in the first article of my choice.

In the way design research is laid out, it seems more subject to qualitative research than quantitative research. Logically, since one “testing out” a design might be very similar to “testing out an idea” where you’re not sure of the outcome, or particularly interested in a restricted portion of all the results, this type of research matches the description of qualitative research more to the point than quantitative research. The analysis of ones findings is crucial (as in any research case) in design research, as the tested product is often one completely new to the market.

During Haibo Li’s lecture a thought that had struck me earlier was confirmed. It seems, after analysing several articles in different journals, the younger the research (release date) the more likely the article is to be inconclusive, lacking parts or theories or just not give an approximation of the results and findings. This is becoming increasingly common as the focus of researchers often lies in the quantity of research, the fear of being wrong or mistaken, the stress and pressure of having to scream loud to be heard and thus able to support one’s research through external financing.

It was refreshing to hear someone stripping all unnecessary BS and slap the “sure you can” on the table, because at the end of the day the idea behind the work in itself is the essential- not the implementation (which is only important).

Theme 5: Design research

Theme 5

After reading:

Fernaeus, Y. & Jacobsson, M. (2009). Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction. New York: ACM. 

I couldn’t help but draw parallels to the principles of interaction between human beings. The authors list a set of different cases where programming robots for commercial use have proven to have a high success rate.
In the first case, a robot that interacts with certain parameters such as heat detection, detection of attributes (the collar, the shoes, the pyjamas) etc

For a human being these parameters would be completely uninteresting if we could not control them and therefore get a sensation of importance or meaning. If we dress up the robot in a certain way, it will act in a certain, predictable way. If we do something else to it, it will act in another predictable way. This is how we deceive ourselves into thinking the robot “reacts” rather than acts, and that we are therefore the “masters” of that taking place. This evokes different feelings in us, such as empathy, sympathy, pride, joy etc.
I draw strong parallels between the reasons for this robot succeeding on the market to why people have babies.
In the other example of robots playing tunes, the question of interaction comes into play when one thinks about early cognitive affection. When children are younger and get that revelation (usually around the age of 2) of realizing they exist, they are individuals who can make calls themselves and decide things for themselves, a need for confirmation of that existence also grows. They might act out on this need by eg pressing buttons or just saying “no” to everything, testing their limits to see what happens… or, later in life- get a robot that does things in correspondence to what we do- ie. we’re the masters, the robot is the slave- and best yet, we don’t need to take responsibilities for the shots we call since it’s only a robot.

2nd part of Theme 5:

2. What role will prototypes play in research?

Prototypes play a large role in a study. When having an idea and deciding to test it out “in public” using media technology (or any kind of technology) it is fairly important that the prototype of that technology can give certain answers to questions asked in the study. As in many cases, the prototype is a test object used to try out hypotheses and can, of course, as any equipment built by humans, fail… or simply fail to deliver the specific information we’re looking for in the way we expect it.

3. Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?

Before going into battle it’s good to test the cannons first.
To guarantee or to come closer to guarantee, that the study is feasible, proof of concept is taken into concideration.
In the film industry, for example, using new and advanced, untested technique, especially for animation movies, it’s much more safe to first make a proof-of-concept-film before trying to implement this advanced technology with all its possible drawbacks on a box office massive production. In this case, the proof of concept film is a short animation. Pixar makes a lot of these.

5. Design research can be presented as a “proof-of-concept” research for further evaluation of more advanced research. If the design research is a first one of its kind, it might be ground breaking for the implementation of new technology in the future. The presentation of design research is usually based on an idea in it’s 2^nd of 3^rd phase of its research development, meaning, it’s more advanced than just testing it out but yet has a long way before one can make proper use of it.

REFERENCES:

The Nature of Theory in Information Systems. Gregor, S. (2006).

Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses. Fernaeus, Y. & Jacobsson, M. (2009)..

Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration. Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008).

Theme 4: Post reflection

Drawing a " map" of an article's structure in an old-school "mind-mapping" way turned out to clarify yet some perspectives that I had not considered before. Without going into detail on the specifics, I will say that visually representating the "signal path" from idea, through hypotheses, outcomes and results and marking the paths with possible theories strips an article of all the plus-minus BS that one so often can find in a text, and states how valid and stable the summing of a study is (not in all cases, naturally).
Having several hypotheses on the go was also something I didn't think of before we drew the lines- each with a quote stating how likely this one hypothesis was to another. What was the final outcome. This is easy to get back to as qualitative research so often wants to prove a theory, hypothesis or an idea and rarely focuses on speculations around it.

Theme 4: Quantitative research

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

Journal: The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health is a journal that covers applied, methodological and theoretical issues. The journal aims to improve epidemiological knowledge on health worldwide.

Article: Possible association between heavy computer users and glaucomatous visual field abnormalities: a cross sectional study in Japanese workers,  M.Tatemici, T.Nakano, K.Tanaka, T.Hayashi, T.Nawa, T.Miyamoto, H.Hiro, M.Sugita, 2004.

 

Foreword: I chose an article of “age” (very young in scientific standards) because I find that the integrity I find in articles dating back a decade or so is generally larger than of today’s articles.

 

The article focuses on the possible relationship between heavy computer use and visual field abnormalities. The question at hand is weather heavy computer users have an increased risk of glaucoma.

 

1.     A number of randomly selected Japanese workers (about 10 000) were tested for visual field abnormalities while also undergoing a medical check up. They also replied to a survey and were interviewed about their computer use. This method was mathematical and analytical.

2.     As I read about how the survey was laid out, the questions involved, I realized this study was well thought out in theory but really lacked conclusive evidence to support this theory in pursuit. In this particular case, the theory was wild and therefore blindly tested through an empiristic study. The study showed some result that was feely subject to interpretation, but not at all clearly, mathematically likely.

What this study in particular takes into consideration is “what are the qualities of the people we are testing?”- not “what are the qualities of people in general”. As empiristic studies usually show, the focus is on something in particular.

3.     This study could have been broader, with subjects from different cultures. As computers in those days were limited (when considering ordinary people) to the “western world” the stress levels of the test subjects were not taken into consideration, for instance. In this particular study, the answers were also sought after to support a theory that had already been established and so I can’t help thinking that maybe the results of this particular study might have been intentionally interpreted in a biased way…

In this case the subjects were a quantity of 10000 people. This might seem like a lot of data leading to an accurate result, however whenever you add to the pot, you upgrade the level of understanding the pot as well. By this I mean the difference between 500 people and 10000 people is that testing the later you have to be preared to also take 200 times more issues into consideration. People are not robots, copied and pasted. They are, in fact, individuals (however manipulated by society they might be).

 

1. Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?
2. Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

The paper "Physical Activity, stress, and self-reported upper respiratory tract infection (E.Fondell, Y.Lagerros, C.J.Sundberg, M.Lekander, O.Bälter, K.Rothman, K.Bälter) focuses on the investigation on the relationship between a specific set of health issues ( URTI) and percieved stress leveld and physical activity. The study was carried out by usong quantitative research in the common fashion of sending out a web-based questionnaire to some 1500 people (at the end of the study) in between ages 20-60 years of age. 

 

 

1.     The benefits of quantitative research are a large number of case studies to make the research as objective as possible. Structured techniques for measuring data such as surveys and interviews of randomly selected people. Statistical data gives a mathematically plausible (can’t really ever say that it’s accurate to a full extent) cause or common nominator. The findings are usually conclusive and describes the nature of the outcome.
This is why it's often used as a basis for further investigation, particularly in Medical science.
The drawback is that the data doesn’t take any human error into consideration. No background on the test subject is accounted for nor is any other outcome that might appear. The only thing that is measured is basically what you were looking for in the first place.

2.     The benefits of qualitative research is generating a foundation for possible quantitative research. The number of test subjects might be relatively low, and the findings may not be conclusive at all, but rather serve as a base for future investigation.
Qualitative research digs deeper into the research at hand and establishes points, theories and hypotheses for questions such as "why" ans "how". From there, one can make predictions.

 

research:

[Possible association between heavy computer users and glaucomatous visual field abnormalities: a cross sectional study in Japanese workers,  M.Tatemici, T.Nakano, K.Tanaka, T.Hayashi, T.Nawa, T.Miyamoto, H.Hiro, M.Sugita, 2004.]

[Qualitative vs quantitative research, http://www.snapsurveys.com/qualitative-quantitative-research]

[Thomas, M. (2008), Quantitative data analysis in education – By Paul Connolly. British Journal of Educational Technology]   

[Physical Activity, stress, and self-reported upper respiratory tract infection (E.Fondell, Y.Lagerros, C.J.Sundberg, M.Lekander, O.Bälter, K.Rothman, K.Bälter)]

Theme 3: Post reflection

This theme has been the most giving and in that sense interesting in my opinion. As I'm surfing the blog posts and reading people's ideas and choices for the article, I think to myself: "now we're talking…"
It is intriguing to learn how people think and how they see when criticizing their own and (and mine) article and journal of choice. What's most rewarding is the front row seat to the versatility of aspects, opinions and theories that may (or may not) differ from one's own.
The fact that the topics of so many articles are interesting is just a bonus.

I for one have been able to shed some additional light on a few questions that I raised in the article of my choice by reading (mostly) other blog posts...
On a further note it's interesting how I now, dissecting pretty much every scientific article I come across, lacks a full "menu" of "what theory is". In many articles no clear conclusion is being drawn, perhaps in fear of one day being proven wrong... (...which is like the worst thing that could happen to a self-centered science-geek..)

 

Post- post reflection

After the second seminar I had further revelations on what and how to look for theories in articles. Looking for theories to apply to the article of my choice turned out to be quite difficult, as none of the existing theories (from last year's course) matched the exact approach taken in the paper. However, after apparently obsessing over this I found a new theory to match to my article;
Cognitive intuition theory.. or something like that...
As there are so many approaches to base an experiment or study on choosing a theory to define one's approach turns out to be quite long-winded.
But searching and searching and searching for theories slowly revealed more to the article than I had first realized. I feel a little more confident dissecting articles as I have a more stable foundation to base my criticism on (which naturally needs more experience in the field).

references

[Intuitive managerial thinking; the use of mental simulations in the industrial marketing context, M.Vanharanta, G.Easton, 2010, Industrial Marketing Management,Volume 39, Issue 3]

[On the use of the auditory pathway to represent image scenes in real-time, G. Bologna, B. Deville, T.Pun, 2009 Neurocomputing 72]