In this post I will try to put some order in the chaos of doing interviews in your thesis or more formally: understand when you should use a case study in your thesis.
One of they key reason why I feel is important for a (master) student to understand this aspect is because there is a strong tendency (from a specific category of students) to believe that “doing interview is easy”. Such students tend to believe that they could write a thesis by asking to their external/company supervisor some questions. The overall philosophy is the following: “the thesis has a (research) question that I have to answer. If my external supervisor answer for me and I write down the answer my thesis is finished”.
OK ok, paraphs I am exaggerating but I guess you can grasp the idea here and why it is important to understand when you should use a Case Study for your thesis. Clearly if you tend to have the mindset that I described above there is not much that I can do for helping you.
In information management (IM) a theory usually belong to one of the following categories:
- Variance Theory: Focus on why something is happening
- Process Theory : focus on how something is happening
- Taxonomy Theory: Categorize and classify what is happening
- System Theory: Components that a part of a system can be better understood in the context of the all system
- Design Science Theory: develop and validate knowledge in a prescriptive manner.
Case Studies are a particular way to validate a Variance Theory (most of the time) or a Taxonomy or (eventually) a Process theory. In other words, you want to understand relationships between concepts that are part of your theory. Note that you can validate such theories in many ways and if you want to use a case studies approach that take advantage of interviews, you need to be sure of the following:
- Your constructs can not be measured in a quantifiable way and nobody has measure it before.
- Is impossible to know what constructs are part of your theory and nobody as attempt a similar thing before
Note that both the points imply that you will conduct a preliminary literature review for ensuring that a different approach can not be used. By doing that you will observe that many of your ideas should probably be validated in a different manner.
Should you use a case study for your thesis? It depends and it is not synonym of interviews, most of the time. This approach is suitable if you do not have any other way to prove your theory/hypothesis/research questions. What I mentioned here is just the tip of the iceberg and if you want to pursue a research following a case study approach (that focus on interview) I encourage you watching the following lecture by Dr. Amiri:
If after reading this post, perform your preliminary literature review and watch the video above you believe that an interview based case study is the most appropriate approach you need to consider how to collect your data, how to structure your interviews and how to analyze your data. Once you have done all of that you should be able to smile after looking at the image below!
Finally, I would suggest to check this article from Dr. Toivonen where she discusses quality in qualitative research and gives few tips for improving your work.
Should you use a #casestudy for your #Thesis ? A simple checklist. #thesiswriting #interview
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This article (Should You Use a Case Study for your Thesis in Information Management?) is part of the miniseries on how to do a good thesis, you can see the full list of post at the following links:
How to Do a Good Thesis: the Miniseries
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