Theme 6: Qualitative and case study research

The article ”The care.data consensus? A qualitative analysis of opinions expressed on Twitter” was first published in September 2015 in the paper BMC Public Health, which holds an impact factor of 2.209. During 2014, a public awareness campaign was launched by NHS England, about the care.data project, where data from patients’ medical records are transferred and stored on a central database. The study aims at identifying and describing the range of opinions expressed on Twitter regarding the project, during a defined period of time. The data were collected by the NCapture tool for NVivo and the method used was qualitative content analysis. The authors stress that this method enabled them to conduct a more detailed analysis, in comparison to other methods such as sentiment analysis and coding algorithms.

The data set were first checked to ensure that it only contained public tweets. The tweets were then presented anonymously and names of individuals and organisations were replaced with profession or type (where known). A grounded theory method was used, as the tweets were read in sequential order, and coded iterative to an evolving list of themes. The authors found 50 sub-themes, which were organised into nine overarching, key themes:

•        Informed consent and the default ”opt-in”
•        Trust, privacy and data security
•        Involvement of private companies
•        Legal issues and GPs’ concerns
•        Communication failure and confusion about care.data
•        Delayed implementation
•        Patient-centeredness
•        Potential of care.data
•        Ideal model of implementation

The tweets were not counted for each theme, and the purpose of the study was rather to highlight areas of consensus and disagreement. The authors stressed that counting the data could result in bias, as it could be misinterpreted. They also claimed that the most frequently mentioned theme does not imply that it is the most important one. The benefit of using the method is the speed of execution and the possibility to quickly gain insights regarding a topic. The researchers showed some examples tweets for each theme, making the research easy to grasp. One limitation includes the lack of guidelines describing how the themes were chosen.  A mixed-methods approach could have enabled the paper to complement the data and give it a more representative overview.

The following issues makes me interpret the research as less valid and reliable:

• Contributing tweets may lie more heavily on one side of the debate than another.
• The tweeters did not approve the use of their tweets in research, which raises ethical questions in regard to the collection of data.
• The researchers did not manage to determine the demographics of the Twitter users, but it is likely that they did not capture tweets from marginalized groups.
• The results do not account for the population as a whole, as only the persons aware of the issue would contribute to the discussion.

The article "Community change: Water management through the use of social media, the case of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin” was first published in December 2014 in the paper Public Relations Review, which holds an impact factor of 1.249. The method employed is case study, and a combination of qualitative interviews and content analysis of media and agency reports have been conducted as part of the research.

Case study is a research strategy that aims at studying a phenomenon in real life using empirical evidence. The goal is to understand ”the dynamics present within single setting”. A case study can involve studying a single case or multiple cases, and there are often various levels of analysis within it. Case study as research method differentiates from pure qualitative research as it does not only rely on qualitative data to provide an answer to the research question, but quantitative data can also be used. A case study can be conducted in order to provide description of a phenomenon, to test a theory or to generate a new theory. The method is highly iterative, and the researcher move between the steps of gathering data, processing it and comparing it to theory. The dynamics of the process, often leads to new insights being generated, resulting in a need for new data. This process yields an increase in empirical validity. An important part of conducting case studies is comparing the concepts, theory and hypotheses with extant literature, which also increases internal validity and generalizability.

The research objective is clearly stated in the beginning, and goes as follow: How has technology in this specific case been used to connect with previously alienated stakeholder and has it met the needs of the community? The previous literature connected the research question is briefly described. The authors do state that limited attention previously has been focused on communication theory in depth through the use of social media. They also state that that agenda setting through social media is a previously neglected area of literature. No other case studies were used in comparison. Multiple data collections methods have been chosen, and the study combines netnography observations with an interview conducted with a representative from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. It is unclear if the netnography have influenced the questions asked at the interview. The author received funding from the Murray-Darlin Basin Futures CRN for conducting the research, which raises the question of the researcher’s trustworthiness. In my opinion, theoretical saturation have not been achieved.