mini-computer with a vastly greater set of affordances. This development did not happen at once, but is the result of existing technology co-evolving with people’s creative ideas and experiences. As these constructions are not given by nature, they must be constantly maintained and reaffirmed in order to persist, and this process introduces the possibility of further change and development. The production of knowledge is thus contingent on human practices being constructed in social practices between mobile users and their world, as well as the researcher’s ability to develop and transmit this knowledge within a social context (Crotty, 2009).
The above explicit reflections constitute the considered philosophical and methodological underpinnings of this dissertation and serve to direct the choice of research methods and to clarify philosophical limitations related to the interpretations of the research results and their reliability. Such clarifications can only be made after the philosophical stance of the researcher has been made explicit (Alvesson and Skjöldberg, 2004; van de Ven, 2007). In the following I will bridge the philosophical underpinnings with the research design of the empirical case studies.
5.3 BRIDGING PHILOSPHY OF SCIENCE WITH RESEARCH
IS research increasingly encompasses interpretive studies including a range of case studies (Orlikowski and Baroudi, 1991; Orr, 1996; Suchman, 1987; Walsham, 1993) and field studies (Clemons and Row, 1993; Curtis et al., 1988). For this dissertation the chosen form of research design is one case study (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2003) and one field study. Sayer (2000) argues that critical realism is relatively liberal with respect to pluralism in the use of research methods: “Compared to positivism and interpretivism, critical realism endorses or is compatible with a relatively wide range of research methods, but it implies that the particular choices should depend on the nature of the object of study and what one wants to learn about it.” (Sayer, 2000, p. 19). Two broad types of research methods exist: extensive methods and intensive methods. Extensive methods employ large-scale surveys, formal questionnaires, and statistical analyses. The researcher looks for regularities, patterns, and similarities, but has only a restricted ability to generalize to other populations and thus has limited explanatory power. Intensive methods focus on individuals in a specific context and employ interviews, ethnography, and qualitative analysis, while asking the question: what produces change? Such research produces causal explanations, which are limited to the situation studied. It should be emphasized that these methods are, however, not mutually exclusive and researchers (e.g.
Mingers, 2002, 2003; Stoop and Berg, 2003) suggest that research results will be richer and more reliable if different research methods are combined together. Case study and field study research are intensive research methods and are fully consistent with critical realism ontology.
The case study approach is particularly well suited to relatively well defined but complex phenomena such as the study of groups, social networks, organizations, and inter-organizational relationships. The boundaries of the phenomena, e.g. mobile adoption in the group, must be determined, though it is not uncommon for these boundaries to change during the course of research (Easton, 2010; Miles and Huberman, 1994; Yin, 2003).
While there are many similarities between interpretive case studies and field studies, the difference between the two is that while a case study seeks to understand a bounded
phenomenon, the boundaries are less strict in field study research. Further, a field study is conducted “in the field” over a period of time. In both case studies and field studies, a researcher may either stay detached outside the studied phenomenon or may intervene in the study. A number of considerations have been made in the decision to apply a case/field study approach.
First, the main research question in Chapter 1: “Introduction” concerns to what extent an understanding of social influences and competing forces assits in explaining the early adoption and use of app phones. Understanding the adoption and use of app phones is possible through recording and analyzing the events that take place as a result of app phone users’ actions.
Second, as will be described in detail in Chapter 6: “Research Design”, a research opportunity arose, leading to the identification of a case study that characterized the phenomenon to be investigated. It had come to my attention that a great number of mobile users had imported the iPhone from abroad and had “unlocked” and “jailbroken”
the device though this is a rather complicated process. Identifying a group of five related individuals opened an opportunity to study this phenomenon and to investigate how social influences impacted their adoption decisions. The field study emerged as part of collaboration between researchers in the DREAMS-project (see Chapter 6: “Research Design”) in my department. The field study consisted of a group of 15 individuals related through their university studies, and focused on iPhone usage instead of iPhone adoption.
The third consideration relates to the collection of data. While case and field study research is essentially open to the kinds of data that might be collected, it is often equated with qualitative data collected through the use of semi-structured interviews. The strength of this method is that it is highly flexible. However, other forms of data collection, such as focus groups, diaries, surveys, etc., can also work well in particular situations and can provide additional non-obvious insights. The case study in this dissertation primarily makes use of semi-structured interviews, but also archival data and discussion group data, while the field study makes use of multiple data collection methods. The choice of
methods in each study was governed by what was expected to be required to establish a plausible causal mechanism, constrained by what data could actually be collected in the research context.
The fourth consideration concerns the issue of data interpretation. Critical realism accepts that data are collected from mobile users as well as from and about material things, such as the app phone. As a result it is accepted that any resulting explanation is necessarily interpretivist in character. In particular, when analyzing respondent-based data, the researcher faces the problem of the “double hermeneutic” (Woodside et al., 2005): not only is knowledge a social product, but also the object of social knowledge is a social product (Giddens, 1974). Social actors are reflexive and monitor the ongoing flow of activities and conditions, adapting their actions to their evolving understandings. As a result, emerging social scientific knowledge will change the actions of the subjects, adding another layer of complexity to the interpretation process since researchers are then required to include their own understanding of the subjects' understandings. This is, however, also the reason that interpretivist research approaches offer detailed and rich insight into studied phenomena.