Post-seminar reflection 6

Since this week’s lecture was cancelled the only reflection I have is from the seminar, however - as with most weeks previous to this I believe the seminar to have been most thought provoking anyways. During the seminar we discussed in groups of three our different qualitative papers - how they differed and why. While we didn’t reach any grand conclusions in our discussion, we could see an indication that the papers with generalizable results were less in-depth than the ones that didn’t (hardly surprising though).

The more fruitful discussion emerged when we started discussing case studies and our chosen texts. I quickly learned that the definition I wrote in my pre-reflection when trying to explain it to a first year student didn’t really cover all aspects, and those it did cover it covered quite poorly. First off we struggled to find a definition to the very concept of a case study since we thought of it from the perspective we initially defined it from - business cases. From the media management course I attended last year the word case was imprinted as something related to business model cases, and thus we discussed the case study’s definition sort of as “study on something which is a real occurence from which one can draw conclusions and build theories”. However, as the discussion progressed in the entire seminar group we quickly realized that the common denominator between all the business cases and case studies in research scenarios was that they were studies of a novel occurrence in which people researched in-depth information on the subject. Thus, from this one could later build theories that are generalizable and therefore applicable on other cases. For instance, Ilias mentioned some author who specialized on case studies in medicine and gave one example of a story of some guy who had gotten an iron rod through his skull without dying. This man’s close ones later noticed him having different character traits and that his personality was altered from this event. Thus brain scientists could perform a case study of this man to deduce which parts of the brain had been affected by the rod and therefore build theories on which brain functions that determine character traits and personality.

I found this discussion interesting and it certainly highlighted the concept of case studies and explained it further, since I (previous to the seminar) obviously hadn’t quite grasped it. Summarizing, I would actually say that this week’s theme was the most interesting since we got to venture somewhat outside the shackles of scientific research and into something which felt more creative and engaging.