Author: Hengyi Fu

The ethical considerations in qualitative research are more complex than in quantitative first because of the nature of qualitative research. Last week’s class mentioned qualitative research focuses on the meaning and on the social world as made up of systems of meaning, as well as the interpretative research of cultures and subjectivity rather than measurement. Thus it accepts the intrusion of values into research and does not necessarily aspire to law-like generalities. The ethical problems presented by the nature of qualitative research include but are not limited to:sample sizes are often too small to be useful, and the subjectivity of the researchers means that the objectivity of qualitative studies is sometimes compromised.It is essential for qualitative researchers to explain clearly in proposal and make sure the funding agencies and research ethic committees know that the emphasis in qualitative research is to capture the complexity of the cases in the sample, and to construct descriptions or interpretations or analyses which may have general relevance and value. Qualitative research is openly subjective and does not aim for objectivity in the sense of a culturally neutral vantage point.

The issues arising out of difficulties in assessing impact on the well-being of participants are another reason which makes ethics in qualitative research more complex. Qualitative research is not physically but has the potential to be a more socially and emotionally invasive form of research, so assessing impact on well-being in diverse and complex social situations presents difficulties. Also the unfolding and exploratory nature of qualitative research can leave researches unable to provide full information to participants at the initial at the initial consent consent-seeking stage. We should be aware of that it is not sufficient to establish that there is little risk of physical harm, the degree of personal and social invasiveness needs to be established,such as the shared intimacy of some types of research interview can expose or exacerbate vulnerabilities.

Social Networking Platform Usage in Intra-organizational Communication

In the short time in which social network platforms have been adopted in organizational contexts, they have been used in two primary ways. The first, and more commonly studied, way is for organizational communication with external parties, such as customers, vendors, and the public. Most organizations that use social networking applications to communicate with external parties have a multipronged strategy that crosses various platforms. For example, they maintain pages on popular public social networking sites like Facebook, and they broadcast messages on microblogging sites such as Twitter. Their employees also sometimes write blogs on news websites and, occasionally, they host social tagging sites.  Communication on these sites is faced externally. The second and less commonly studied way in which organizations have employed social networking applications is for internal communication and social interaction within the organization.  To date, most studies of social networking applications for internal communication have been conducted by scholars within the computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human computer-interaction (HCI) communities. These studies in CSCW and HCI have focused on special issues in social networking application use for organizational action and can be categorized into three types.

The first type of study emphasized the usage practice of a new medium (email, IM, wiki, social tagging system, blog, microblog, etc) in workplace. These studies usually combined participant observation, and content analysis (both quantitative and qualitative), and quantitative surveys as research method.

Participant observation, which was used in to examine how a particular medium was adopted and used by an organization, has been defined as a research method that involves participating in people’s daily lives over a period of time, observing, asking questions, taking notes and collecting other forms of data (O’Reilly, 2005). Similar to ethnography, participant observation is deemed the centerpiece of ethnographic research, because it avoids the artificiality of controlled experiments and the unnatural setting of surveys and allows access to first hand data that may be otherwise unobtainable (Kozinets, 2010; Murchison, 2010). Participant observers in ethnography can adopt four different roles: covert observer, overt observer, covert participant, and overt participant (i.e., true participant observer) (Schutt, 2006). As a covert observer, the ethnographer seeks to observe things as they are without participating and disclosing her/his role as an ethnographer. In contrast, the overt observer announces her/his role as an ethnographer. The covert participant acts like the people under study without identifying her/his role as an ethnographer, while the overt participant announces her/his research role and participates in group activities. The presence of overt observers or overt participants might alter the behavior of people under study. Participants can have the opportunity to experience others’ lives and learn from their points of view, but may take the risk of becoming native and losing objectivity. Observers can have enough time to record what happens and stay objective and scientific, but may fail to gain the insider’s view. Which role to adopt depends on the research topic, the ethnographer’s personality and background, the nature of the field, and ethical concerns (Murchison, 2010; Schutt, 2006). The ethnographer’s role may not necessarily remain fixed during an ethnographic study, but may change depending on the situations (O’Reilly, 2005). The participant observers in those studies mentioned above are either developers of certain platform (e.g., Yammer, one corporation-oriented social networking site) or research team members from the studying organization (e.g., IBM or Microsoft research center) thus have the convenience to serve as covert observer to minimize their influence to people under study. Although those researchers aimed at studying the usage practice of internet-based mediums, they didn’t conduct participation and observation using auto-netnographic approach, ranging from “reading messages regularly and in real time, following links, rating, replying to other members via e-mail or other one-on-one communications, offering short comments…contributing to community activities, to becoming an organizer, expert, or recognized voice of the community” (Kozinets, 2010, p. 96). Because of the research topics, they are not interested in being a real community member and recording and analyzing their own online experiences, which is the advantage of auto-netnographic approach, but preferred to take the content analytic approach lurking around an online setting to ensure their studies are unobtrusive.

Content analysis, which was used by those studies mentioned above to analyze posts and field notes to develop themes for specific research questions, has been defined as a technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts to the contexts of their use (Krippendorff, 2004). Content analysis can be classified into latent (subjective and qualitative) and manifest (objective and quantitative) (Babbie, 2007). Early content analysis was objective and generated quantitative summaries and enumerations of manifest content, but qualitative and latent analysis have found greater acceptance over time. Because those studies aimed at using post and field note content to emerge in the process of a researcher analyzing a text relative to a particular context (Krippendorff, 2004), they all used interpretive, relatively subjective, and less rigid approach to code the latent content, which is also indicator of contexts, discourses, or purposes, and to understand the underlying meaning.

The second type of study focused on specific aspects of media use, such as motivations or barriers. A related, but distinct, third type of study examined social networking applications, as organizational tools, for facilitating individual career advancement and managing communication and collaboration. These two types of study mainly used qualitative semi-structured interview method to collect data and then coded all of the interviews to identify major themes for each research question. Qualitative interviewing is a research method aims at understanding people’s points of view, experiences, thoughts, and feelings with the purpose of producing knowledge (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). According to Rubin and Rubin (1995), qualitative interviewing has three unique characteristics that distinguish it from other methods of data collection. First, qualitative interviews are modifications or extensions of ordinary conversations, but with important distinctions. Second, qualitative interviews are more interested in the understanding, knowledge, and insights of the interviewees than in categorizing people or events in terms of academic theories. Third, the content of the interview, as well as the flow and choice of topics changes to match what the individual interviewee knows and feels.

Qualitative interviews can be categorized into semi-structured interviews and unstructured interviews depending on the degree of structure (Blee & Taylor, 2002). In unstructured interviews, without giving specific questions the researchers let the interviewee to direct the flow of conversation and introduce and structure the problem in her/his own words corresponding to the broad issues raised by the interviewer. In semi-structured interviews, the researchers create an interview instrument consisting of a list of questions before interviewing, which allows the flexibility to change the order of questions, ask follow-up questions, seek clarifications, and add extra questions during the interview. The researchers are supposed to play a more active role in leading semi-structured interviews than in unstructured interviews. The purposes of semi-structured interviews are to explore, discover, and interpret the meaning of phenomena. Compared to unstructured interviews, semi-structured interviews can ensure the research questions to be addressed. The researchers could retain the flexibility to ask follow-up questions developed from content analysis or participant observations, seek clarifications, obtain explanations and background information, and tailor the interview guide to different interviewees (Murchison, 2010). Most studies mentioned above employed semi-structured interviews because 1) they have done previous studies using other research methods to develop interview instruments which include a list of specific, pre-determined questions; 2) they aimed at acquiring the same type of information from participants so can help to organize information more systematically and quickly; 3) the researchers preferred some flexibility in the process of collecting data.

 

References:

Babbie, E. (2007). The practice of social research (11th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.

Blee, K. M., & Taylor, V. (2002). Semi-structured interviewing in social movement research. In B. Klandermans & S. Staggenbory (Eds.), Methods of social movement research (pp. 92-117). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: Doing ethnographic research online. Washington, DC: Sage.

Krippendorff, K. (2004). Conceptual foundation. In Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology (2nd ed., pp. 18–43). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kvale, S., & Brinkmann, S. (2009). Interviews: Learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. Sage.

Murchison, J. M. (2010). Ethnography essentials: Designing, conducting, and presenting your research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

O’Reilly, K. (2005). Ethnographic methods. New York, NY: Routledge.

Rubin, H. G., & Rubin, I. S. (1995) Qualitative interviewing: The art of hearing data. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Schutt, R. K. (2006). Investigating the social world: The process and practice of research (5^th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

 

I like grounded theory as a methodology since we didn’t have to plan out every detail of our study beforehand (yes because I’m lazy…).  This is often a challenge in exploratory field research where researchers are not aware of all peculiarities of the setting we are about to conduct a study in. When using grounded theory, it is “officially” part of the research methodology that questions are refined over time, that not all interviewees are pre-determined, and that the resulting theme is unknown beforehand. Similarly, we were able to change direction during the study when we found interesting themes to follow-up on. This is something that frequently happens in qualitative research, but grounded theory makes it explicit.

Going into the grounded theory study and the coding practice, I was concerned that after all the open coding, there would be no “core category” that emerged from the data, but in fact, it seems a bit like magic the way that sufficient coding would eventually lead to a clear perception of category or conceptual label. Although we group only went through probably 5 posts, I can say that we did encounter some core categories that came out pretty clear.For example, we group found students are quite concern about cost and they also seemed pretty close to each other and behave as a community. I think this is one of the benefits from the “explicit” nature of grounded theory. During the open coding, the use of grounded theory helps us ignore pre-conceptions of how and why certain incident occur. Going through the posts on a line by line basis forces us to think about every aspect of the data collected and allows us to consider everything the subjects encounter. Grounded theory coding process also forces us to focus on concepts that become part of the theory because they are present in the data more than once. This makes it easier for us to focus on themes that are relevant in the study context rather than themes that only matter to us (the researchers).

Another thing I was thinking about but not sure is, the role of research questions when using grounded theory as methodology. We usually have questions going into a study, but these questions could be refined, changed, and altered throughout the study. This could present a challenge when reporting the research questions for a study. To be thorough, we would have to report the initial questions along with their iterations over the course of the study. However, research papers usually aim at the dissemination of research results rather than a discussion of the research process itself. So should we only report the final set of questions?

This annotated bibliography containing 30 articles regarding Social Networking Platform Usage in Intra-organizational Communication served as Part 1 of my project updates 2. I deleted and added some new articles from my draft of project updates 1. In this annotated bibliography I mainly focused on identifying research questions and research methods of each article. Most articles employed qualitative research methods, including interviews (structured, unstructured, semi-structured), qualitative content analysis, participant observation, and focused groups. Semi-structured interviews and qualitative content analysis of log or post turned out to be the major research methods in this field.

Traditional social technologies (CMC) in organizational communication

1. Cho, H. K., Trier, M., & Kim, E. (2005). The use of instant messaging in working relationship development: A case study. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 10(4).

This study combined quantitative surveys collected from 137 employees of a Korean organization, structured interviews with 13 employees of two work teams, and content analysis of employees’ IM transcripts to examine how the employees of a Korean tire manufacturing company used IM to maintain their working relationships with coworkers within and across various organizational boundaries.

2. Herbsleb, J. D., Atkins, D. L., Boyer, D. G., Handel, M., & Finholt, T. A. (2002, April). Introducing instant messaging and chat in the workplace. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 171-178). ACM.

This study reported findings of introducing an instant messaging and group chat application into geographically distributed workgroups based on participant observation. The perception of the tool’s utility depend both on users’ views of the importance of informal communication, and their perceptions of the nature of cross-site communication issues. A number of other issues including privacy concerns, individual versus group training, and focusing on teams or individuals have also been discussed in this study.

3. Hinds, P., & Kiesler, S. (1995). Communication across boundaries: Work, structure, and use of communication technologies in a large organization. Organization Science, 6(4), 373-393.

This is a case study of communication within the headquarters of one large organization in which communication partners have equal access to all three technologies: telephone, email, and voice mail. From logs of communication over two days and post-diary interviews, the authors examined vertical and lateral communication inside and outside the chain of command and department, and the use of telephone, email, and voice mail for this communication.

4. Isaacs, E., Walendowski, A., Whittaker, S., Schiano, D. J., & Kamm, C. (2002, November). The character, functions, and styles of instant messaging in the workplace. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 11-20). ACM.

This study logged thousands of workplace IM conversations on a prototype instant messenger application called Hubbub and evaluated the conversational characteristics and functions. Contrary to prior research, they found that the primary use of workplace IM was for complex work discussions. They also identified two distinct styles of IM use: working together and coordinating. Those who work together use IM for a range of collaborative activities, while those who coordinate have short, single-purpose conversations, often to schedule interactions in another medium.

5. Leonardi, P. M., & Bailey, D. E. (2008). Transformational technologies and the creation of new work practices: Making implicit knowledge explicit in task-based offshoring. MIS quarterly, 32(2), 411-436.

To study the knowledge transfer problems in offshored and distributed work, the authors choose a firm that sent engineering tasks from home sites in Mexico and U.S. to an offshore site in India as studying site, and investigated how employees contend with problems that arise from the use of transformational technologies across time and space. This study combined observation (total 10.5 months), semi-structured interviews, survey, and project-tracking log analysis. Five practices to transfer occupational knowledge to the offshore site have been identified: fining requirements, monitoring progress, fixing returns, routing tasks strategically, and filtering quality.

6. Nardi, B. A., Whittaker, S., & Bradner, E. (2000, December). Interaction and outeraction: instant messaging in action. In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 79-88). ACM.

This study discussed findings from an ethnographic study of instant messaging (IM) in the workplace and its implications for media theory. Research data is from interviews and observations supplemented with logs of IM sessions. The authors documented the flexibility and expressivity of IM for various informal communication tasks, and described the unexpected use of IM for outeraction processes that are distinct from but essential for information exchange.

7. Quan-Haase, A., Cothrel, J., & Wellman, B. (2005). Instant messaging for collaboration: A case study of a high-tech firm. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 10(4).

This study used survey and semi-structured interview to examine uses of instant messaging (IM) in a high-tech firm to illustrate how knowledge workers use this new work tool to collaborate with co-workers. Questionnaire and interview data show that while IM leads to higher connectivity and new forms of collaboration, it also creates distance: employees use the mediated environment as a shield, distancing themselves from superiors.

8. Skovholt, K., & Svennevig, J. (2006). Email copies in workplace interaction. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 12(1), 42-65.

This study combined content analysis of email collection and unstructured interviews to examine how employees in a distributed work group use email copies in networks of collaboration. The results shown copying in recipients serves to share knowledge of ongoing projects and to build up a common information pool and is used to facilitate multi-party interaction and to build personal identity and alliances. Copies to third parties are also be used for reasons of social control, for instance in order to gain compliance or to put pressure on the addressee to conform to social norms of conduct.

Social media and knowledge sharing in organizations

1. Archambault, A., & Grudin, J. (2012, May). A longitudinal study of facebook, linkedin, & twitter use. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2741-2750). ACM.

This study combined four annual surveys and follow-up interviews at Microsoft during 2008 to 2011 to investigate the usage practice and perceived usefulness of certain social networking applications, with a focus on organizational communication and information gathering. Most survey participants confirmed the benefits of social networking sites reported in former studies: for fun, for personal socializing and networking, for networking with external professional contact, for internal networking within the company. Interviews also suggested an increasing number of participants confirming the effectiveness of social networking applications in building and strengthening weak ties with colleagues and getting quick answers. However, interviews also revealed sources of skepticism about the internal use of social networking application—especially among the executive group and young overseas employees.

2. Brzozowski, M. J. (2009, May). WaterCooler: exploring an organization through enterprise social media. In Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work (pp. 219-228). ACM.

This paper presented how WatherCooler, a tools that aggregates shared internal social media and cross-references was adopted in a large global enterprise based on observation. Despite the lack of complete social networking affordances, Such tool can still change users’ perceptions of their workplace, make them feel more connected to each other and the company, and redistributed users’ attention outside their own business groups.

3. Davison, R. M., Ou, C. X., Martinsons, M. G., Zhao, A. Y., & Du, R. (2014). The communicative ecology of Web 2.0 at work: Social networking in the workspace. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(10), 2035-2047.

The broader research question this study tried to explored is understanding where, how, and why Chinese organizations use Web 2.0 application (Microblogging, IM, Wikis), using unstructured interviews. The theoretical framework they proposed (W2OC model) was theoretically based on the communicative ecology framework and embedded with five propositions in which the authors described how Web 2.0 technologies facilitate horizontal and vertical communication processes in organizations, moderated by client media preferences and managerial support as well as the consequent outcomes of this communication. However the narrow dataset may lead to less universal value of this model and quantitative data is need to validate the high-level propositions.

4. DiMicco, J. M., & Millen, D. R. (2007, November). Identity management: multiple presentations of self in facebook. In Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work (pp. 383-386). ACM.

This study aimed at developing a framework to understand how users manage self-presentation while maintaining social relationships in heterogeneous network, using a combination of Facebook profile page analysis and interviews of employees at IBM. Different identity managing patterns were identified based on subjects’ behavioral types, which were determined by the variability presented on their profile pages.

5. DiMicco, J., Millen, D. R., Geyer, W., Dugan, C., Brownholtz, B., & Muller, M. (2008, November). Motivations for social networking at work. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 711-720). ACM.

This study addressed the research questions about how professionals insides of a company use an internal social networking site. In particular they focused on how using a social networking site inside of a company differs in terms of social connections and also in terms of different user motivations. Based on qualitative interviews and content analysis of usage logs of Beehive (a social network site behind IBM’s firewall), the authors ound unlike the Facebook usage by professionals, in which professionals mainly use Facebook to connect with their social friends outside of work, they use Beehive to connect with the weak ties—those they would like to know better- instead of keeping up with the colleagues they know well. Compared to general social networking site like Facebook, where users are more willing to keep up with friends and not for “social browsing”, they argued the reason of why employees are willing to meeting new people in Beehive is the existing common ground. This study also investigated the motivations for connecting and sharing using Beehive and how different content type supported different types of goals.

6. Efimova, L., & Grudin, J. (2007, January). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. In proceedings of the 2007 Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 86-86). IEEE.

This study focused on weblog authorship and the blogger’s view of the readership. Using Microsoft as the study site, the authors proposed and discussed several research questions including the evolution of perceptions and policies regarding weblog; when, where, and how employees blogging; the motivations of manipulating work-related blogs; benefits and potential negative impacts to employees as well as the companies when producing work-related information available internally and externally. Content analysis of employee weblogs, weblog email distribution lists, weblog guidelines and policies, participant observation of weblog issues discussion, and semi-structured interviews of 38 people in this organization have been used to study people’s perceptions and reflections on weblog as a new communication medium.

7. Ehrlich, K., & Shami, N. S. (2010, May). Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace. In proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conferences on Weblogs and Social Media (pp. 42-49). AAAI.

This paper also aims at understanding the benefits of using microblogging in workplace and users’ microblogging behaviors in an organization setting. using a combination of semi-structured interview and content analysis. The novelty of this paper is it analyzed and compared the use and perceived value of microblogging of same group of users with external and internal tools simultaneously. It can be expected that post content, user’s motivation, and perceived benefit will be different when targeting to internal audience (employees and colleagues) and external audience (friends, family, and strangers).

8. Günther, O., Krasnova, H., Riehle, D., & Schöndienst, V. (2009). Modeling microblogging adoption in the enterprise. In Proceedings of the 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems.

Based on the results of four focus group sessions, the authors identified constructs to play an important role in the microblogging adoption decision, including privacy concerns, communication benefits, perceptions regarding signal-to-noise ratio, as well codification effort. Integrating these factors with common views on technology acceptance, they then formulate a model to predict the adoption of a microblogging system in the workspace.

9. Holtzblatt, L. J., Damianos, L. E., & Weiss, D. (2010, April). Factors impeding Wiki use in the enterprise: a case study. In CHI’10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 4661-4676). ACM.

This study explored factors that impacted the use of wikis as a tool to support the dissemination of knowledge within an enterprise, using semi-structured interview. The authors concluded the reluctance to share specific information was due to a perceived extra cost, the nature of the information, the desire to share only “finished” content, and sensitivities to the openness of the sharing environment.

10. Huh, J., Jones, L., Erickson, T., Kellogg, W. A., Bellamy, R. K., & Thomas, J. C. (2007, April). BlogCentral: the role of internal blogs at work. In CHI’07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 2447-2452). ACM.

This paper focused on examining how BlogCentral (IBM’s internal blogging system) facilitating organizational knowledge management and how bloggers viewed their goals and targeted audiences. The reported findings were drawn from semi-structured interviews of BlogCentral users and follow-up content analyses of each informant’s blog based on interview comments. From their observations of blog usage, the authors discussed several patterns bloggers utilizing to facilitate information gathering, knowledge sharing, and common ground building: blogs can be used as a platform to seek for assistance from readers (collaborative knowledge producing), to attract readers and build rapport (common ground building), to enhance social interaction (facilitating transfer of tacit knowledge) ,and to aggregate information on the web (external knowledge gathering).Based on the observation they identified four dimensions that corporate blogging can be used to support work: it can work as a medium for a variety of employees to collaborate and  give reciprocal feedback; as a place to share expertise and acquire tacit knowledge; as a place to share personal stories and opinions that help people to know more about one another, which may increase the chances of social interaction and collaboration; as a repository to aggregate information from external sources by writers who are experts in an area.

11. Jackson, A., Yates, J., & Orlikowski, W. (2007, January). Corporate Blogging: Building community through persistent digital talk. In proceedings of the 2007 Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 80-80). IEEE.

This study provided an extensive exploratory study of the nature and benefits of corporate blogging based on usage statistics, interviews, and a user survey. In contrast to Efinova and Grudin, this paper focused on an internal blogging site, examining its perceived and actual benefits for users in a large, distributed organization. In order to examine if the perceived and experienced benefits of corporate blogging varied among usage level, they used both posting and commenting activities as criteria to stratify blog users into three equal-sized groups (heavy, medium, and low users). Three general types of benefits have been identified via survey: informational, social, and other. Although the perceived and experienced informational and social benefits differed three user groups, the perceived work-related benefits did relate to usage level, and none of these groups experienced high community-related benefits. The authors also identify two corporate-specific benefits: broad-based (how users understand what happens in the organization, and then gain broader knowledge of the organization) and focused (gain a more focused and specific view of what is currently valued in the organization).

12. Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., & Tseng, B. (2007, August). Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. In Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis (pp. 56-65). ACM.

This paper mainly focused on the topological and geographical structure of Twitter’s social network and the user intentions in microblogging. Four main user intentions on twitter have been identified via content analysis of twitter messages: Daily chatter, facilitating conversations, sharing information, and reporting news. A single user may have different intentions or serve as different roles (information sources, friend, and information seeker) in different communities (clusters).

13. Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., & Gumbrecht, M. (2004, November). Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 222-231). ACM.

This study, based on ethnographic interviews with bloggers and text analysis of blog posts, analyzed why and how create and use blogs, and argued blogs, as a form of communicative activity in which bloggers and audience interact through writing and reading, are more like radio rather than diaries. The two key findings of this paper are:  blog is 1) a large arena of social activities; 2) a broadcast medium of limited interactivity.

14. Seebach, C. (2012, January). Searching for Answers–Knowledge Exchange through Social Media in Organizations. In 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS) (pp. 3908-3917). IEEE.

This study contributed to knowledge management literature by exploring how microblogging facilitates knowledge sharing in an organizational context. Based on content analysis of enterprise microblogging messages, this study mainly addressed two research questions: 1) what kind of knowledge users seek and request microblogging, and 2) how users contribute knowledge. The author viewed interactions between knowledge seekers and contributors through the lens of social capital theory and analyzed how tie strength could influence the quality of knowledge exchange (this is the primary theoretical contribution of this work). The results shown factual, opinion, recommendation, and rhetorical questions were delivered via microblogging with the highest frequency. While the major of recommendation and social connection questions were not directed to a specific question, when asking for specific knowledge resources, users mostly turned to people they already know.

15. Skeels, M. M., & Grudin, J. (2009, May). When social networks cross boundaries: a case study of workplace use of facebook and linkedin. In Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work (pp. 95-104). ACM.

This study combined survey and unstrctured interview to examine users’ attitudes towards and usage patterns of social networking applications in Microsoft. A much clearer picture of LinkedIn use emerged from the data analysis, which indicating high level of positive attitude and perceived usefulness, especially from young professionals. Facebook usage shown a more complex pattern, especially when the use extending to work colleagues. The authors concluded the purposes of using Facebook in the workplace were reconnecting, maintaining awareness and keeping in touch, and building social capital, which did enable more efficient interaction by strengthening the weak ties among colleagues.

16. Steinfield, C., DiMicco, J. M., Ellison, N. B., &, C. (2009, June). Bowling online: social networking and social capital within the organization. In Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies (pp. 245-254). ACM.

This paper explored the relationship between various dimensions of organizational social capital and the use of an internal social network site (SNS) using surveys. The results suggested that bonding relationships, sense of corporate citizenship, interest in connecting globally, and access to new people and expertise are all associated with greater intensity of use of the social network site.

17. Riemer, K., & Richter, A. (2010). Tweet inside: Microblogging in a corporate context. In Proceedings of 23rd Bled eConference.

The main purpose of this paper is to explore Enterprise Microblogging (EMB) usage practices, and compared the communication pattern with the results reported from similar studies on Public Microblogging (PMB) in Twitter. Content analysis of posts identified 18 individual genres and 6 top-level genres which represented distinct types of interaction: Provide updates, Coordinate others, Share information, Ask question, Discuss & clarify, and Record information. The genres identified indicated EMB has been appropriated mainly for two team practices: 1) create and maintain team awareness; 2) coordinate team and report task progress. The authors specifically mentioned other team practices such as discussions and in-depth collaborations were not frequent. Compared to the communication genre in PMB, in which users are more concern about self, in a corporate context, users provided information with the needs of others in mind. The authors argued a shared context and expectations reciprocity contribute to such difference based on followed-up interview. Microblogging as a practice is highly context dependent. Use of microblogging in a corporate context is formed by the needs of task and by the shared group context. It can be expected the use of EMB can be rather different within another organizational context.

18. Turner, T., Qvarfordt, P., Biehl, J. T., Golovchinsky, G., & Back, M. (2010, April). Exploring the workplace communication ecology. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 841-850). ACM.

This study combined two annual surveys and interviews to build understanding of why particular communication tools are selected and how the tools are used in the workplace. Three major research questions were discussed in this study: 1) usage trends in communication practices in the workplace, 2) how different groups of people adopt new technology, 3) the strengths and weaknesses of technologies in use. The results suggested people’s choices of and interactions with communication technology are governed by their communication ecologies, which support a diverse set of tools to meet user needs. The introduction of new tools did not impact significantly the use of previously adopted technologies, rather, new technologies are being used alongside older ones.

19. Yardi, S., Golder, S. A., & Brzozowski, M. J. (2009, April). Blogging at work and the corporate attention economy. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2071-2080). ACM.

This study examined a large internal corporate blogging community using log files and interviews and found that employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet. The interviews suggested that two factors are most influential on internal corporate blogging behavior: whether or not a blogger perceives others are reading their post, and management support for blogging.

20. Zhang, J., Qu, Y., Cody, J., & Wu, Y. (2010, April). A case study of micro-blogging in the enterprise: use, value, and related issues. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 123-132). ACM.

This paper claimed to be the first detailed case study which systematically examined how microblogging, as a new communication medium, has been adopted and used in the workplace. The authors used data from Yammer, a corporate version of Twitter which is restricted to employees of an enterprise.  The classification of genres of message indicated users are more interested in sharing non-personal news or new findings, especially external technology news. Conversation seeking message is also a big portion in sample data, which suggested Yammer was also used as an intranet forum. The portion of personal-related message is relatively low and the majority of these messages are still about the person’s work rather than personal activities outside work.  The survey which aimed at investigating users’ perceptions of Yammer’s value reported Yammer helped support informal communication, increase awareness, and establish potential relationships, but was not so efficient in broadcasting company internal news and industry news. Both content analysis and survey indicated microblogging use on a corporate intranet was different from Twitter use on the Internet.

21. Zhao, D., & Rosson, M. B. (2009, May). How and why people Twitter: The role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work. In Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work (pp. 243-252). ACM.

The main contribution of this work is articulating why people use Twitter and defining behaviors that help explain why some organizational uses of Twitter are more successful than others. To frame their work, the authors defined two benefits of informal communication: relational benefits, including person perception, common ground building, and connectness, and personal benefits. The research method was phone interviews with 11 people from a large IT company. Through these interviews the authors found three ways in which the interviewee’s thoughts about Twitter: frequent life updates, real-time information, and people-based RSS feeds. They also identified problems with Twitter according to interviewees: security, integration and Filtering and grouping.

22. Zhao, D., Rosson, M. B., Matthews, T., & Moran, T. (2011, May). Microblogging’s impact on collaboration awareness: A field study of microblogging within and between project teams. In 2011 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS) (pp. 31-39). IEEE.

The goal of this study was to analyze whether and how project team members use microblogging as a communication channel for sharing project information, and how this would affect project awareness, which is a key challenge in collaborative processes. The text analysis of project team posts identified 6 categories: project task status, information and idea sharing, other work status, questions, and work availability. The interviews revealed microblogging can impact co-workers’ collaboration awareness and building cross-project awareness outside of the team by enabling conversation, information, and feedback got exchanged as work in progress.

 

 

 

1. Study questions: How users of social Q & A evaluate the quality of answers? Are there any criteria they prefer in identifying answer quality?

2.Unit of Analysis: Users of  Stack Overflow (a social Q&A site for programmers: http://stackoverflow.com/)

3.Data Collection: Data collection consist of content analysis of the comments of high-quality answers (upvote score >100), statistical analysis about the relationship between upvote and different features presented in the answers, and interviews with users.

4. Data Analysis:

a) All of the interviews will be audiorecorded, transcribed, and coded using NVivo 10. Two researchers independently code all of the interviews to identify major themes for each research question. After comparing, discussing, and resolving any differences in their coding, the researchers create a codebook and use it to recode all of the data. 

b) We will filter out unqualified comments and then identify specific accounts of “selection criteria” in the qualified comments using an inductive content analysis.  Two researchers participate in the analysis. The initial coding scheme emerge from interview findings and previous research.

c) We will divide answer feature set into 8 groups: Structure, Length, Style, Relevance, Review History, User, User Graph, and Readability. We then conduct two series of experiments. First, we represent our question-answer pairs using only the features of each group in isolation, in order to determine the individual impact of the group. Following, we represented the Q&A pairs using all the features, leaving out one group at a time. By this way, we can verify how each group is able to contribute to the results, independently from the other groups.

5. Alternative Design Possibilities: I’m very interested in using survey to examine what selection criteria users prefer in identifying high-quality answers regrading programming, because I assume the criteria they use will be different based on individual characteristics (e.g. how long they use that site, how active they are on that site, their own expertise, etc.). Survey opens up the possibilities to approach a relatively large size of studying subjects directly (comments  and statistical models can only reflect their opinions from a data perspective). However, this site does not offer in-site message function and only part of the users provide their contact information (email, etc.)on the profile pages, so sampling will be a problem if I decide to use a survey.

 

For this week’s exercise, I asked my classmates about their usage practice of Wikipedia.My initial idea is to examine the users’ criteria for identifying high-quality answers in social Q&A sites,which is closer to my major area. However, it turned out to be the first interviewee I picked up never use social Q&A and thus didn’t understand what I was asking. This reminded me that delivering your interview question to the right population is the first thing you need to be sure, especially if you would like to ask questions about attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and feelings.Everyone may have experience to go grocery shopping but obviously just a small group of people uses social Q&A!

Once I changed my topic to Wikipedia, the “population” problem still hasn’t been solved completely due to the high level of homogeneity in subjects. I got quite similar reflections from all three interviewees: they all used Wikipedia as a “starting point” and used the references and external links as indicators to evaluate the quality of certain article (the validity dimension), and mainly focused on the “objective” information the article provided. Dawn said “it will be an issue if any phd student trusts the Wikipedia article too much and does not care what the resources it referenced!” That’s the reason why all the interviewees reached high degree of agreement–because all of them are phd students. However, such bias in the population should be avoided in a research project. I didn’t have chance to share my experience in class about the interview I’m currently conducting –to examine the multilingual searching behavior of Chinese, Shu and I are trying our best to select our interviewees based on the communities they represent (e.g. Chinese lives in different parts of the world) and their professions. The purpose of the selection is to avoid the bias in the population I mentioned above.

As I mentioned in class, I feel unstructured interview turned out to be the most effective one. I assumed very few people will actually look at Wikipedia’s history or discussion pages so I didn’t include related questions in my semi-structured interview with Cheryl. However, in the unstructured interview with Tim he mentioned in some cases he will check those pages and use them as indicators of the quality. This provided new perspectives from the interviewee’s side and helped me to add questions to my interview instrument.

 

Field Notes Paragraph

I spent nearly 20 minutes observing the starbucks team in Strozier Library from 2:40 -2:57pm on 2/5/2015. There are seven staffs, including one trainee and her supervisor. Three staffs were making coffees and did not take other responsibility. Since they did not have a large customer traffic during that period, they talked with the customers if the customer initiated the conversation. This “coffee maker” group also chatted a little bit with each other but seldom with other staffs. The trainee was assigned to serve as a cashier and make tea, and her supervisor was taking inventory so had much time to speak to the trainee.  Another staff was responsible for shelving, heating food, and cleaning the self-help desk. The seventh was helping make tea during that period but should be the “on call” for other tasks. That trainee, if her supervisor was available, would turn to the supervisor if she had any question. But if the supervisor was out of sight, the trainee seemed have sense about which staff knows what (menu, deal, how to use the system,etc.) and would directly turn to that staff for question. Both the “coffee maker” group and other staff chatted based on the “physical priority”, but the trainee would only response if other staff talked to her instead of initiated conversation by herself.  Since I sit pretty close to the counter, I was able to hear how they chatted –usually just small talks or little jokes, no work-related stuff. Although they do not have the written rules, it seemed they have a high degree of agreement about how to coordinate with each other and act as a team. However, they did not have a large traffic during that period, probably less than twenty customers. I assume the group dynamic will be quite different if the customer traffic increases.

Reflection

The difficulty of “unobtrusive observation”, from today’s class, is how to ensure the observation is truly “unobtrusive” (or is it really possible?). During the discussion with Cheryl I know in her case, the “boss” of the Strozier reference desk(her observation group) noticed her and even asked her if she needs any help. In my case, since where I sit is really close to the counter so I (have to) buy some potato chips from them to “pretend” I was a customer doing my homework there. Although I think they didn’t notice me, since I already watch the counter, probably some of them still felt I was a “strange” customer( the “real” customer who sit besides me always focused on his textbook). Their behavior may be a little bit different (especially that trainee) if they noticed me.

Another difficulty for me is since this is a relatively large and dynamic group, I was not sure what I should “observe” when several things are happening at once. I choose to focus my observation on that trainee since she was the “outlier” in that group which may cause the change of atmosphere, but the cost is I was able to pay much attention to other sub-group(s) like the “coffee maker”. Also Tim’s observation reminded me that I probably should pay more attention and document the conversations between the staff and with the customers.

 

Before entering this doctoral program I know almost nothing about qualitative research. Coming from a technology field, Dr. Gross’s class is the first time I know terms like “participant observation” and “focused group”, and it took me a while to figure out the term “coding” refers to an interpretive technique not programming…Until now I still didn’t have much experience using qualitative methods (although I plan to) in my research, but I’m trying to be more familiar with how qualitative research should be conducted through research project(s) which will not directly related to my dissertation topic. Now I’m conducting interview about usage practice and user intention of multilingual search queries–the topic I used for Dr. Gross’s class. Since I do not have much training about how to conduct interview, sometimes I feel I over direct the participants too much, which may hurt the objectivity of the results… It seems qualitative research requires higher level of research skills, relatively, than quantitative, since the researcher’s experience and skill sets have more chance to influence the quality of data. However, I do get many interest findings from the interviews, which I’ve never known or found from quantitative data (I collected real-time multilingual search queries directly from search engines too). And for the “why question” (not only for this study), in most cases can only be answered by qualitative research. So I will definitely employ qualitative method in my dissertation, which (probably) focuses on people’s perception of quality of collaborative knowledge creation  and how they feel certain design can facilitate the knowledge creation and exchange, as well as improve the quality of the “final product”.

Hello everyone,

This is Hengyi (Holly) and I’m a second year doctoral student in school of information. I got my master degree of Library and Information Science from  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013. Before that,I studied Computer Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Before entering the doctoral program, I worked as an IT consultant for KPMG and graduate assistant/programmer for International & Area Studies Library and Grainger Engineering Library in UIUC.

My research interests include Online group work,Social computing, Human-computer interaction,and Social informatics.

Outside of the field of research: I’m originally from Suzhou, which is a major city on the east coast of China and well-known for its classical gardens. Before coming to U.S, I have studied and worked in Hong Kong and Japan so I can speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese. Outside of the field of LIS, I have played violin and double bass for long. I’m also a GO (One kind of East Asian board game) player, manga and PC/video game enthusiast, figure skating fan and bunny owner!