Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

Part1:

I choose the article is called: Application of Multi-media Technology on the E-commerce Website in China: A Case Study on Jumei Youpin

Journal: Information Technology Journal

Artists: Yang Hongtao, Ge Tingjun, Li Baizhou and Liu Hongzhen

Published Year: 2013

Volume: 12 

Issue: 17 

Page No.: 4298-4302

DOI: 10.3923/itj.2013.4298.4302

This article is a case study of a famous E-commerce website in China, which is the biggest cosmetic group purchase website in the Chinese market. This case study is to investigate how this website uses the application of multi-media technology on the e-commerce website.

Which qualitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

Qualitative research is for investigating the reason of people’s behave, and the reason or method when people made decisions. It is more focus on small specific group or case study, to gain information or knowledge of this specific case study. The method of this article is a case study, the benefit of the case study is more focus on a specific case, which may make the research result more fits requirements. but the limitation is case selection and structure should be accurate, it is not always easy to find the correct case object. An average, or typical case, is often not the richest in information.

What did you learn about qualitative methods from reading the paper?

The qualitative method here is a case study, it involves an up-close, in-depth, and detailed examination of a subject (the case), as well as its related contextual conditions. The case is individual, organisation, event, or action, existing in a specific time and place. 

Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the qualitative method or methods have been improved?

The main method used in the study is data analysis, these data are empirical data, which is too abstract. I think they can combine case study and fieldwork method together, or add some interviews, which may make the result more persuasive.

Part2:

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

Case-study research can mean single and multiple case studies, can include quantitative evidence, relies on multiple sources of evidence, and benefits from the prior development of theoretical propositions. The case study is not qualitative research, but qualitative research has a research method called “case study” since case studies can be based on any mix of quantitative and qualitative data. Three types of cases may thus be distinguished: Key cases, Outlier cases, Local knowledge cases. The process described here is highly iterative and tightly linked to data.

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.

Based the table 1), the strengths can be analysed as:

The well-designed prototype, and highly tightly interactive linked data, and clear purpose of research, it also shows the reasonable selection.

I actually didn’t find very obvious weaknesses from this process of building theory table, I think the research approach is good and accurate. This way well suits the new research area, if I have to say at leat one weakness is this maybe add more examples of the case study or give a category to these examples.