This week has been about qualitative research and case study research. Unfortunately, I missed both seminars due to a lab assignment in the computer security course I'm taking and due to a whole day of the mutimodal course. The nice thing about our seminar in the multimodal course was that we evaluated one scientific article per group and then discussed it, similar to the setup we've had during this course. It was nice to apply the use of searching and finding articles with high quality and that has been published in a journal that is relevant to our research. We had a short discussion about how to find relevant papers and it seems like me and one more person who has read this course had a pretty straight forward and easy method to find relevant papers for our multimodal project.
Other than that, I had a comment on my previous blog post and really had to think about an answer that would be relevant to the question. It was about how many persons you should have when conducting a qualitative study and as I said then, it feels like it's really different dependent on what you are researching. For example, the multimodal paper I read that was about gaze- and gesture-tracking they only tested it on 3 persons. But in that case, maybe it was enough since it main objective was to determine that their algorithms for detecting the eye-movement were good enough. If you, on the other hand, instead we're to evaluate how it would work on regular players (i.e. not the researchers that know the system) you probably should test it on different age groups, different genders etcetera.
To get some idea of what's been discussed during the seminars this week I browsed some of the persons that already posted their seminar reflection at it seem that the setup has been pretty similar to previous seminars (i.e. speak about each individual paper and discuss it more). The difference between different qualitative research methods that you can use was probably the one I found most interesting since it feels like a judgement call that I could probably face in the future (I've already faced it during the bachelor thesis, then it was about how to setup the interviews). The discussion about whether to use focus groups to discuss something or individual interviews seem relevant since both contribute in different ways. When using the focus group, you save a lot of time in contrast to individual interviews but it is important to take into account how the atmosphere is and that everyone get the chance to speak their mind and give equal amount of input. I feel that group dynamics is something very interesting and you need to take into account when conducting focus groups. This is a problem you really don't have to face when doing interviews, but on the flip-side you could miss the collaborative aspect of focus groups. It seems like all methods have their positive and negative aspects and it's important to really think about what method you should choose.
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