Final Reflection

Course reflection

This is my reflection on the course. I have posted all my comments to other blogs in a separate blog-post.

I think this course have been a really interesting one. Mostly because it’s been stimulating the entire time due to the different parts of the course (i.e. starting off with philosophy, then continuing with different kinds methods).

The first week, during the philosophy theme, I was thrown off that a course named Research and Methods in Media Technology had a section about just that. In one way, I struggled a lot with it. I’m not used to the level that Kant was writing on and I also am not used to this philosophical and complex way of thinking. But on the other hand, challenging yourself is always useful and fun. At first I had a hard time seeing how this theme was relevant and had anything to do with research-methods in general. In retrospect, I can see how the first and second theme really built a foundation for me to the other themes and helped me to reflect on another level and also gave me another perspective that I didn’t have before.

The first theme really got me thinking about knowledge and what knowledge is. It also changed how I look at knowledge to some extent. Before I’ve never really thought about that knowledge is something that we classify and that it could differ from person to person. Knowledge to me has always been there as a concept that I’ve never questioned. After the seminar, where we mainly talked about Kant, I tried to be more open to these kinds of thoughts but I still struggle. One thing I remember is the discussion about that you can’t describe knowledge to someone who doesn’t have it. Can you really describe it without examples? There are no right or wrong answers here and it can be hard to cope with for someone that isn’t used to that.

Moving on to the second theme, I think it connected the philosophical thoughts to a more social-perspective. One part that really got stuck with me was the concept of nominalism, and more specifically that we need something more than nominalism – we can’t just change the world by looking at it, we need to use our perception as a tool. Really interesting and once again it was something that I never really thought about before. As more of a scientific person and as a soon-to-be engineer I often think that the scientific knowledge is the correct one, but after the second week I understand that we need also to listen to ideas and rationalism to get a vision of a tolerant and just society (with theories such as human rights and equality between gender). 

The third theme sort of gave an introduction to the subsequent themes and also connected them to the previous ones. It was really good to discuss the different meanings of expressions that we would use the following weeks, such as theory, statements, hypothesis etc. It’s interesting how hard it could be to put into word the meaning of a specific word. Before that week seminar, I really thought I had a good understanding of all the terms but as soon as we started discussing I realized that we all had some sort of different perspective and personal meaning to the words. This is not good if you are suppose to do a research, everyone in the team need to be clear with what you mean with what. Another important thing that came up was the importance of defending the problem. Haibo told us that a correct defined problem will make the problem solving a lot easier. If you haste through this stage of the research you might end up with even more question and the real problem, that you where meant so investigate, might just have been a part of the first problem you came to think of.

The last month (theme 4-6), I’ve got a deeper understanding and a lot of more knowledge about different research methods (more specific qualitative, quantitative and case study). To being able to do so I’ve read quite a large amount papers. One thing that crossed my mind more than once during this month was how hard it was to distinguish what methods had been used in the papers. Often the paper I had chosen for the week had a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods. I found it especially hard to interpret if a paper had conducted a case study or not since if often wasn’t explicit said in the paper.

Since many papers seemed to use a combination of methods I started to think of why. When reading different ones it appeared that those who had used a combination of methods got a much broader understanding of the problem that they conducted the research on. So many times it’s not enough to just use one method, you have to combine methods to improve the analytic power and get a deeper understanding. When combining method you could complement the weaknesses and strengths of the complementary method, you also get each method’s perspective at the problem. This might sound a bit self-explanatory now but every method has its pros and cons and it’s very important to know what they are so you could compensate or at least have it in mind when conducting a study. For example, when using a qualitative method, you normally don’t get any data to make a comparison between different studies. But when you use a survey in the same study, you get comparable data and therefore compliment the qualitative method’s weakness.

One thing I find really interesting is if you are doing a research in one area it will most likely have been previous research in the same area. Since you often don’t want to investigate the same thing, you could change the combination of methods and therefore get a different perspective on the problem. So combining different methods you could answer more complex questions and the area you research will be more explored and understood at a multidimensional level.

So there is a lot of useful and good things coming with combining methods, you get a more comprehensive understanding, it could explain causality and you as a researcher could customize the method (a strength in qualitative research is the opportunity to customize interviews or other qualitative methods). But the more I read I also understood that when combining methods, the research design could be very complex. I think it’s therefore I had a hard time distinguishing what methods that had been used in some papers.

As a final thought I think when combining method, such as qualitative and quantitative in a case study, the different methods are all linked to each other at some level. So it might be wrong to see them as separate methods. Instead it might be easier if you see them as a set of tools that you can combined in different ways so solve a specific problem, a problem that are in need of just that combination of tools.