Theme 4: Quantitative research - prior

My paper

I chose a paper from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, which has an impact factor of 1.778. The paper is called The Role of Social Network Sites in Romantic Relationships: Effects on Jealousy and Relationship Happiness (Beukeboom & Utz, 2011). The paper investigates how the use of social networking sites (SNSs) affects romantic relationships in terms of jealousy and happiness. The conclusions were that people in general experienced more happiness than jealousy in reaction to the partner’s activities on SNSs. Individuals with low self-esteem experience more jealousy than people with high self-esteem. These two groups did not differ in the experienced SNS happiness.

The quantitative method that they have used in this paper is an online survey which has been held among all students following a course on interpersonal communication at a Dutch university. The survey contained various personality measures and questions on SNS use. 194 people in total completed the survey (56 males and 138 females) which 103 of those were involved in a relationship and thus were the important subjects. The mean age of the participants was 22 years and the mean relationship duration was 25.75 months.

One strength in their method is that they have used a whole class which consists of both very active and less active SNS users. As they states in the paper, other forms of recruitment of subjects, for example via SNSs may lead to a self-reflected sample in which there are an overrepresentation of highly active users.

Since the paper was made by students the benefits of using an online survey are that you can get it out quickly to a lot of subjects. It is also a low cost method and it takes little time effort to carry out which is often important in school. The limitations are usually the possibility of only attracting certain kinds of people; those that are very interested in the product/research area and thus willing to participate. This they had solved though with their method for recruiting subjects. Since they chose students though, the age is limited to the age group that probably uses SNSs the most. Questions with fixed answers, as they had, may also not describe the situation for the subjects in the best possible way.

As the authors stated in the paper, all the measures were self-report measures and therefore the results could have been influenced by social desirability. Also the sub groups that used various SNSs were too small to systematically compare users from different SNSs. To get a more generalized idea of the situation, the survey could have been sent out to students in more than just one course or maybe to another forum like an evening cooking class where the age range is rather different.

“Physical activity, stress and self-reported upper respiratory tract infection”

More infections during the winter than in the spring are a no-brainer. It was interesting to see though that if you are highly stressed, physical activity has a greater effect on preventing URTI, than if you have a low level of stress. They made good use of quantitative research to get a generalized picture of how physical activity affects the risks of getting URTI. When making this investigation in how something affects something else I think it’s very good to use a quantitative method because then you want to get greater accuracy.

Benefits and limitations of quantitative methods

The quantitative research allows you to do a broader study which involves a greater number of subjects. In quantitative methods you get vast sources of information which allows for greater objectivity and accuracy and you can make comparisons across categories and/or over time. The limitations are that you can miss contextual details and the results are limited in that sense that they provide numerical descriptions rather than detailed narrative as well as providing less elaborate accounts of human perception.

Benefits and limitations of qualitative methods

The benefits of qualitative methods are that you obtain a more realistic view that can’t be understood by numerical data and issues can be examined more in detail and in depth. It also provides for direct interaction with the research subjects. The ways of collecting the data are also more flexible since the framework for it can change during the execution. The limitations are that the findings are harder to visualize, it can be easy to drift away from the original objectives of the research and the researcher’s presence during data gathering can affect the subject’s responses.

References

Beukebom, J, C. & Utz, S. (2011). The Role of Social Network Sites in Romantic Relationships: Effects on Jealousy and Relationship Happiness. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication Volume 16, Issue 4, pages 511–527, July 2011.

Fondell, E., Lagerros, Y. T., Sundberg, C. J., Lekander, M., Bälter, O., Rothman, K., & Bälter, K. (2010). Physical activity, stress, and self-reported upper respiratory tract infection. Med Sci Sports Exerc, 43(2), 272-279.