Theme 4: Quantitative research (Post)

I attended a seminar two days ago in which we discussed how quantitative studies are used in research papers. We were divided into small groups and were asked to present the papers that we had read and what kind of studies that had been performed. For some reason we all found major methodological problems in our papers, such as one study collecting Internet behavioral data from 2003. Even though the study itself was performed 2011 or 2012, the authors chose to use “old” data concerning how people discuss politics (online, offline, both, or none). We all felt that data from 2003, when the Internet still was “young”, cannot be applied to draw conclusions about the current Internet behavior. I do not remember the exact problems in the other studies, but we all agreed that they all had some methodological issues. An interesting remark is that one of our group members found a paper which used both quantitative and qualitative method at the same time. The authors of that paper conducted deep interviews with 20-something participants, but analyzed and presented the findings at statistics/data. This was interesting because I have never really heard about that method before. According to Hrastinski this is called a mixed-method.

After presenting and discussing all our articles there was unfortunately not much time left to pick an article to present for the whole group. We decided to pick my article, which was the one with the least methodological problems. In short my article evaluates if student prefer email or face-to-face communication when they need to get in contact with their teachers or faculty advisors. The authors collected data from 300 university students through a questionnaire, and it is therefore a clear example of a quantitative method. From the data the authors drew the conclusion that students prefer FtF-communication in most cases, unless it is just a simple question that could be answered quickly by email.

We tried to describe the article/method through a written flow-chart, but because of the lack of time we could not really describe the whole research process in the detail we wanted.