“What is, Becomes What is Right”: A Conceptual Framework of Newcomer Legitimacy for Online Discussion Communities by Silvia Elena Gallagher and Timothy Savage
The paper uses using what is referred to as Qualitative directed content analysis. Content analysis is used to find commonalities within communication, be it written or verbal. It can be used to describe phenomena within the context of that, for example, specific communication platform. A directed approach is based on previous theory and research, and is therefore used to confirm or add to preexisting theory. In this paper they are using it to find what textual codes newcomers to online communities use and what makes these codings stand out. This was done through using literature to establish a base a coding framework on, and then by viewing four different online, active communities and analyzing posts made by newcomers to these communities. They then looked at what strategies these posters used to gain legitimacy within the community and managed to establish common themes and way to do this.
Talking about “codes” like this might make the method seem quantitative, but this is not the case. The authors did not look at amount of times a word was used or anything like that, instead they looked at the whole context of the post. They look for commonalities that might not be explicit, but can still be determined from the text and subtext of the post.
I think this a good approach for this kind of study. It requires going through a lot of written material at a rather fast pace, and so the “simplifying” if using a predetermined code system speeds up the process significantly. The use of four different communities helped avoid findings that would not be useable in a general context, as it meant that local behaviours were accounted for. They established a framework that can be used in future studies, but one that as they say is not a static tool and could be adapted to a new context.
Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources on Twitter During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions by Alfred Hermida, Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith
A case study is the process of looking at a specific case to develop and prove a hypothesis. When doing a case study you start out with a basic idea of the topic you want to research, and then go and find a person, a place, or an organization of interest to this topic. It differs from other research methods in that you don’t start out with a well developed hypothesis, but instead create one during the study itself, based on what you find. You also do data collection and analysis at similar times during the course of the study, instead of the traditional approach to first gather all the data and then analyze it all. A case study also usually looks a limited number of cases, although the amount varies. It can be a single case as in the paper I chose for this week, or it can be up to eight, as in the Harris and Sutton (1986) study referred to in the Eisenhardt paper.
The paper I chose seems to be, based on the criteria from Eisenhardt, to be fairly solid. It seems the case was chosen early on, since the research questions as presented in the paper are very specific to the single case in question. It is however possible that they have been reworked in the process of doing the study, I have no way of knowing that.
The fact that the study is done on past events makes it harder for me to analyze their data collection process, since the study is based on stuff that is readily available online, as archived twitter posts. However, I can discern that the process seems to have been made with consideration to avoid bias and errors. The literature comparisons are perhaps a little limited in scope, since it seems to focus on the one viewpoint about “old media” as the gatekeepers of information, and the paper wants to prove that this barrier is being torn down in this case. However there are numerous sources on relevant material, and it helps prove their hypothesis. The conclusion is clear and easily understandable, but the conclusion of the case is not decided by the researchers as much as by the context.
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