Reflections - Theme 4

This week was about Qualitative methods. We only had one lecture this week and it was with Ylva Fernaus that was one of the authors in the text “Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses” by Fernaeus, Y. & Jacobsson, M” that we read to this weeks theme. We discussed what methods were used in her paper, and she asked us questions about if we could find any empirical data in the paper and how we would characterize it. Eventually she said that she was actually surprised that their paper had been accepted by the community as she didn’t think it contained enough empirical data, so that was kind of funny. So hearing this makes me not sure what to think about her paper and the Qualitative methods in it when she doesn't think it deserves it herself. However as the homepage said that her lecture was more about bridging over to the next subject about Design Research where I can see this article more fitting.

I could unfortunately not attend the seminar as I was preoccupied and could not reschedule, however I spoke with my classmates and got the feeling for what was said during the seminar. From what they said it was one of the most giving seminars and I wish i could have attended. One thing that came up in the discussion where about content analysis (CA) and more about who can do a content analysis and what it really is.

I think that I’m personally more familiar with quantitative methods than qualitative as all the previous projects I've done have used fairly simple data collection through surveys with grading evaluation. However it seems that a lot of people have done more qualitative research in their Bachelor thesis, and since I’ve yet to done mine, hopefully I’ll experience this myself this spring.