Developing Expertise in E-Commerce: A Content Analysis of Students' Knowledge of Online Auctions

Journal of Information Systems Education, Spring 2005 by Foster, Jonathan, Lin, Angela

The second point for discussion is the reliability and validity of our results. Reliability defined as "agreement among interpreters" (Bauer, 2000), and validity defined as "the degree to which a result correctly represents the text or context" (Bauer, 2000). Two quality measures were built into the research design i.e. a coherent coding frame and inter-coder agreement in the assignment of codes once the frame had been designed. Both measures contributed to consistency in content analysis process.

It has been stated "the main fallacy of content analysis is the inference of particular intentions or understandings from the text alone. Intentions and reception are features of the communicative situation and do not depend on the text alone: they are co-determined by situational variables" (Bauer, 2000: 145). This is certainly something we found when conducting our own analysis. If a sentence appeared to be open to more than one interpretation, the authors were thrown back on attempting to identify the student's intention in writing the sentence, as a criterion for determining the sentence's meaning. However "it may be possible to exclude certain readings or intentions, especially if the coders share an understanding of the world with the sender or the audience" (Bauer, 2000: 145). This was in fact what the authors were able to do, since the authors shared with the students the domain knowledge on the E-Business and E-Commerce course, as well as some knowledge gleaned from interpersonal discussions between tutor and student.

6. CONCLUSION

The research questions guiding this study were: (i) what knowledge did the students acquire from and apply to the online auction assignment? (ii) how was the knowledge distributed across the types of propositional, process, and personal knowledge? Clearly our analysis of students' submissions for the online auction assignment has enabled us to glean some information on this. The major conclusion being that for most of the students, their writing up of their experience of participating in the online auction is often imbalanced with respect to the types of propositional, process, and personal knowledge. Given a framework of professional knowledge and competence this appears to suggest a need for further development.

The main implications of the study are two-fold. The first implication is methodological. Our study is based on an analysis of some twenty per cent of the assignments. Ideally a greater proportion of assignments from the student population could be sampled. This would extend the validity of the results, and the applicability of the content analysis method used. Furthermore, having first established that there is considerable variation in the knowledge that students acquire from and apply to the online auction assignment, further steps would be (i) to consider whether the pattern of the imbalance is the same for both buying and , for selling, and (ii) to look for factors in the student population that explain such imbalances e.g. work experience, gender, disciplinary background, and culture (e.g. Foster and Lin, 2003).