MethodologyBack to Research Proposal --05.08.18--
- On defining KM competence: an e-mail survey sent to KM
researchers. Maybe a web survey posted in a community like
KnowledgeBoard.
- On the perception of KM competence development: a survey of
graduating students. Difficult to implement, required very strong
support from someone from the institution.
--05.5.23--
Notes from Cohen, Manion & Morrison (2000). Research Methods in Education, 5th ed.
Yin (1984) identifies three types of case studies.
- descriptive (narrative accounts)
- interpretative (developing conceptual categories inductively in order to examine initial assumptions)
- evaluative (explaining and judging)
Merriam (1988) provides the same three types and list four common domains:
- ethnographic
- historical
- psychological
- sociological
Sturman (1999) identifies four kinds of case study:
- an ethnographic case study, single in-depth study
- action research case study
- evaluative case study
- educational case study
...
Because case studies provide fine grain detail they can also be used to
complement other, more coarsely grained, often large scale, kinds of
research. ... case studies frequently follow the interpretive tradition
of research - seeing the situation through the eyes of participants -
rather than the quantitative paradigm.
... a key issue in case
study research is selection of information. ...useful to record typical
representative occurences... it may be that infrequent but critical
incidents occur that are crucial to the understanding of the case. ...
Case studies, in not having to seek frequencies of occurences, can
replace quantity with quality and intensity, separating the significant
few from the insignificant many instances of behavior. Significance
rather than frequency is a hallmark of case studies...
types:
participant vs. non-participant, unstructured vs structured (degree of
structure imposed), natural vs artificial, with a combined in the
middle (degree of structure in the setting).
Planning a case study:
- the circumstances of the case
- disruption caused by participation
- negotiation of access
- negotiation of release of data
- the conduct of the study
- primary and secondary sources
- opportunities to check data
- triangulation (peer examination, repondent validation, reflexivity)
- data
collection methods (semi-structured and open interviews, observation,
narrative accounts and documents, diaries, tests, maybe survey,
experiments)
- data analysis and interpretation, and theory generation, if appropriate
- writing the report (separate conclusions from evidence, balance illustration with analysis and generalization)
- consequences of the research (for participants)
- anonymizing of the research
Data collection types:
- unstructured (field notes) vs. structured (survey, census, data)
- narrative (field notes) vs. numeric (ratio scale data)
- journalistic (impressionistic) vs. statistical (inferencial statistics)
--Booth, Colomb & Williams, 2003, The Craft of Research--
Reader's role: - Entertain me with something interesting I didn't know
- Help me solve a practical problem
- Help me understand something better
- Topic: I am studying...
- Question: because I want to find out what/why/how...
- Significance: in order to help my reader understand... (asking 'so what?')
Connecting pure research to practical consequences:- Topic: I am studying...
- Question: because I want to find out what/why/how...
- Conceptual significance: in order to help my reader understand...
- Potential practical application: so that the reader can improve/do...
| 
