Case Study Strategies for Architects and Designers: Integrative Data Research Methods by Marja Sarvimaki

Author:Marja Sarvimaki [Sarvimaki, Marja]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317480617
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

Interviews, then, can provide you with either quantitative or qualitative data depending on the goal of your inquiry and how your questions are articulated. As a reminder, you should have an analytic strategy prior to data collection, which with regard to interviews means that you have a plan on how to analyze and interpret the answers. An interview with a structured format would, ideally, give you quantitative information easy to evaluate, like number of desired rooms, size of teams in an office setting, future functions and their dimension requirements, and suchlike. In design research, these kind of interviews would be typical in the programming stage, revealing the needs and expectations of the future users; for example, as a part of data collection in a Pre-Occupancy Evaluation. Or, interviews can be part of a Post-Occupancy Evaluation with the goal of finding out how a building is performing (e.g., in comparison to the Pre-Occupancy Evaluation) which can guide similar design solutions in the future. In the context of urban planning, the data could include what percentage of residents prefer one feature over another, how many residents support and how many oppose a proposed change, and other statistical inquiries included in your case study protocol. In other words, the results would be rather similar to that acquired with a questionnaire, just with a different response format, because the data is obtained by talking with the respondents of the study; this, of course, means that attaining quantitative data with interviews is doable only with somewhat small groups of respondents. Conversely—as anyone involved with design knows—the users themselves are not always aware of the prospects of a project or a setting. An unstructured interview could, thus, shed more light into their perception of the case and provide in-depth information, of which even the participants of a study themselves might not be aware. As this method has many advantages, but also pitfalls, we continue examining open-ended interviews in the context of fieldwork on pp. 91–5.

Besides questionnaires and interviews, we can obtain data by direct observations, mapping, sorting, or equivalent evaluations of a real-world setting. Direct observations range from casual accounts of a context—or its sense of place, if you wish—to formal numeric data of it. For example, William Whyte’s correlational study, answering why some public places in New York City were more popular than others, was based on counting the number of people in certain plazas at lunch hours and comparing that data with the amount of sitting linear feet and the size of open area, to summarize the quantitative data of this extensive study very succinctly. Another case study covered by Groat and Wang is Kevin Lynch’s renowned investigation The Image of a City, based on mapping. In it, the participants of the study were asked to draw rough maps of their city (Boston, New Jersey, and Los Angeles), after which the researchers produced composite maps juxtaposing the drawings. The visual analysis revealed a high positive correlation in the residents’ perceptions of the characteristics of

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