Theme 4: Quantitative research (Pre)

I chose the paper Students’ Perceptions of E-Mail Interaction During Student-Professor Advising Sessions: The Pursuit of Interpersonal Goals, which was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The aim of this study was to assess if students prefer e-mail over face-to-face (FtF) communication for interpersonal communication with faculty advisors.  A questionnaire was sent to 300 students at a university in the northeastern United States, asking them to answer questions about how often they use email, if they prefer email over FtF, their perception of self-presentation in emails, etc. It is clear that this is a quantitative method, since there are no in depth interviews and the questionnaire is sent out to a relatively large group. 

I learned how quantitative methods could be used to not only to answer the main research question, but also to evaluate differences between sub-groups of the sample. I think one weakness in the use of the quantitative method is that the sample group might be a little too small to conduct sub-group analysis on. Even though there were 300 respondents in total, the number of African American males (which was analyzed as a sub-group) was much smaller. In order to get statistically reliable results the size of the subgroups (and therefore also the total number of respondents) might have to be increased.

The paper Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection evaluates how the incidence of upper respiratory tract infection (cold/influenza) is related to the subjects’ level of physical activity. Data was collected from 1509 Swedish males and females in the age 20-60 years old. The results suggest that there is a strong negative correlation between the occurrence of URTI and the level of physical activity. People who report high levels of physical activity in their everyday lives have an 18 percent reduced risk of URTI compared to people with low levels of physical activity. Even though this paper is far outside the area of media technology I found it somewhat interesting to read. I like to see how “real” scientific papers are constructed in terms of methods, language, presentation of results etc. Also, something that I found interesting is that one of the authors, Mats Lekander, did the statistical analysis for my dad’s PhD thesis. I have also worked with him a couple of times at the Karolinska University Hospital in Solna.

A good example of a quantitative method would be the “partiundersökningar” / election polls that are held each month in Sweden. In these polls there are usually a thousand or two thousand people that are being asked which party they would vote for if the elections would be held today.  I think that the main benefit of a quantitative method is that it helps you to get a broad overview of a subject. If a sample group of people is a representative for the society in general, the results could be extrapolated and applied to much bigger groups (perhaps Stockholm or Sweden). Downsides of this method are you often get very “raw data” or numbers from the results. A study with thousands of people has to be constructed in a very general way so that the results can be statistically analyzed. Therefore you might miss out in important information or subtitle opinions of people. Going back to the election polls, we see that a quantitative survey will produce a statistically reliable data of which party people would vote for, but it would not explain why people vote as they do or how they perceive the different parties.

Qualitative methods on the other hand are perfect for in depth knowledge and personal interviews with subjects. Aging using the election polls as an example, a qualitative study could be personal interviews that are made after the quantitative study to collect more in depth data. Benefits of these methods are that you get a deeper understanding, and interview subjects could provide you with valuable “plain text” answers instead of just raw data. The interview does not have to follow a strict script, and the direction of the interview could be changed in real time with for instance follow up questions. Limitations of qualitative studies are that small groups of people might not yield statistically significant / reliable results. Also, it is very hard and takes a lot of time to present the finding of in depth qualitative interviews in a good visual way.