Theme 6: Qualitative and Case Study Research - Reflection

This theme's papers that I chose was definitely the most interesting ones that I've read during the whole course. The first one was a case study about how a couple of students make sense of Internet mediated communications versus the traditional, state controlled, TV-media. The other was a case study that had as a goal to analyze the role media affected Sarah Palin during the elections in the United States in 2008. This week I couldn't attend the first seminar due to being out of the country, but I read a bit about the seminar on other people's blogs and it seems that most of the time was put on interviews. It's quite a shame that I missed it since I learned some new stuff from one of my papers last week (which is written about in the previous post), and it would have been giving to hear other people's opinions about them. It would have been nice to discuss things such as self-identification, since it's a very interesting topic in my opinion, and after reading the paper a really important one as well. An example from the paper was that a person saw himself as a democrat, but as an outsider his opinions as a straightforward supporter of Putin one could argue that that's not really the case. I liked that this problem came to light in the research paper since it brings up the questions of subjectivity in research. Or just the problem of subjectivity in general when dividing people into groups based on opinions, which most of us seem to do whether it being deliberately or not to feel connected to other people.

As this is the last blog post I must say that I've learnt a lot during the course and I will probably keep this blog - even if hidden from others - to serve as kind of a reminder in the future when conducting some kind of research. Theory and Method for Media Technology as a subject is clearly much bigger and complex than I originally thought when the course started off, and there's a lot to take into account and reflect about so it's good to have something to come back to. Even though I probably have missed some information in my posts, it can still serve as a basis for theory and method.