onsdag 4 december 2013

Theme 4: Quantitative research - reflection

To prepare for this week’s theme I read the paper by Bälter et al, as well as my own selected paper The Role of Social Network Sites in Romantic Relationships: Effects on Jealousy and Relationship Happiness by Beukebom and Utz. To find a paper using quantitative methods that I also would find interesting I browsed through a journal (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication ) that I like and where I found the paper for the previous theme. I simply searched in the previous issues for a paper that sounded interesting and when I found one I looked if it made use of any quantitative methods.

In the seminar this week we discussed in smaller groups our chosen papers and what quantitative methods they had used. The task was then to choose one of the papers, discuss it more in-depth and make a chart that explained the method and the questions discussed in the paper. The chart that we made was put up on the course wiki in the quantitative methods section. I think this was a fairly hard task since I do not have much experience in making such things. When I come to think of it, I believe that our chart could have been improved very much with some minor tweaks in order to make it easier to grasp. In my opinion, the other group in the seminar had more success in that aspect because theirs had a simpler structure.

Something we discussed on the seminar regarded all the possibilities of designing your quantitative research method. In the seminar there was a paper that had used a method of observation where students observed their friends procrastination during studying. Then the question is how the relationship between the observer and the subject affects the observation. For example being friends can make the subject more relaxed and thus act as usual, or on the other hand the subject might go onto Facebook more than usual because he wants to show his friends something.

Stefan told us an example of a paper that had reported about loneliness and social networks. He pointed out that people have very different perceptions of loneliness. Some people feel lonely even though they meet people every day. Other people can go two weeks without seeing someone and still don’t feel lonely. This is an important aspect to think about when doing research overall, not just with quantitative methods I think. I am not sure exactly how this knowledge helps us in developing good research methods though.

In the second seminar on Wednesday with Olle Bälter we discussed much on the advantages and disadvantages of quantitative and qualitative research methods as well as the advantages/disadvantages of online questionnaires compared to paper questionnaires. Olle was using an interesting method for discussion that I hadn’t come across before at a seminar at KTH. The discussion was sort of a competition with a point system inspired from the game Boggle where you get a point for an example that no other has thought of. So we were given time to come up with advantages/disadvantages in smaller groups and then we presented them and if you had something that no other group had then you got a point. I think this method was a fun way to discuss such as issue where you have to come up with examples. The minor drawback was though that sometimes there were, in my opinion, too much discussion about whether something was an advantage or not just because you wanted to hinder another group from getting a point.

2 kommentarer:

  1. Hi. I think you've summed up the week nicely. I believe we were in the same group and here are my comments to your reflection.
    I agree that the flow-chart could be greatly improved. I made a comment about this in my blog as well, I think we all were quite lousy at making these charts since we didn't know enough about the methods or about making flow chart. I have some experience of making flow charts for work-processes from my current employment, as well as a little bit from software design.
    However, not fully understanding all components of the research process you're trying to describe doesn't exactly help.
    I do recommend that people study the flow-chart-making possibilities in Microsoft PowerPoint or similar software.
    Like you, I also found the study method of students observing students interesting and quite different.
    I share your uncertainty regarding how all this helps us develop research methods of our own. But I think that this is just the initial peek into the world of research methods, and as I've repeated almost like a mantra in my two last posts, I've learnt that I need to learn more about research methods and statistics before I start handing our my own research questionnaires.

    SvaraRadera
  2. Hej Filip!

    I agree with you: making the chart for the first seminar was a hard task, especially since we are not used into doing this. But it somehow it helped us in understanding the role and importance of quantitative methods and that in papers like that we can usually find significant correlations between phenomena. In the beginning, neither was I completely satisfied with our chart, but I believe that the structure could not be simpler because our paper was a complex one. A lot of variables were examined.

    I also agree that the discussion-competition that we had at the second seminar on advantages and disadvantages of quantitative and qualitative methods was really interesting. It helped me in understanding that some types of methodologies could be more appropriate for specific type of researches.Having said that, I need to underline that I don't believe that there is one best methodology. As I discuss in my post, I think that it depends on focus and aims of a specific research.
    Even though I found this competition helpful, as you noted, I feel that the situation went out of hand at some point. I disagreed with some students' behavior. The concept was to discuss, debate and argue-not only talk, but also listen to other people's opinions. In the end the goal- to get a better understanding regarding advantages and disadvantages of different methodologies- was achieved.

    SvaraRadera