Research Paper
This week I chose the research paper Discursive Equality and Everyday Talk Online: The
Impact of Super-participants (Graham, T and Wright, S. 2013) from Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communications. The paper
focuses on the “dominant” minority of posters online, called super-posters, on
the moneysavingexpert.com
forum. To get good results – analyzing the tone and consequences without preconceived opinions about the subject – they picked a topic that the majority of people have very
little knowledge of, nano-technology.
After
collecting data they found out that 2,052 super-posters (0.4%) contributed 47%
of 25m+ posts. Often these super-posters are portrayed in a negative way,
attempting to stop other users from posting or even attacking them. However,
this paper’s foundings – using both qualitative and quantitative content
analysis – show that most of them didn’t do this, but rather that the majority
of super-posters discursively performed a range of positive roles. Degrading
posting activity only consisted of 2%, curbing (stop others form posting)
1%, and banter/humor 11%.
Quantitative
content analysis is a method for studying recorded human content of
communication. Content analysis makes it possible to compress a lot of textual information and systematically identify their properties, and compressing a lot of words into fewer content categories. When analyzing linguistics the results can depend a lot on the decoders
interpretation, where for example irony can be troublesome analyzing,
especially in text form. To provide basic validation of a coding scheme, it’s
essential that the coding scheme can be used as a measurement tool with similar
results when used by more than one person. Objectivity – or at least
inter-subjectivity – plays an important role in the sense of reliability.
Even though
they used a lot of data, which supposedly would generate good, and even
somewhat generalizable results, the study is still executed in a certain kind
of forum. The intention with using a subject that many are unfamiliar with is
great, but I think that the general tone of super-posters are quite different
on a forum focusing on economy (with probably a bit older users) than for
example Flashback Forum with a possibly younger audience (at least in some
forum subjects), that might be more prone to using an harsh tone, and trying to affect other posters.
Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper
Respiratory Tract Infection
In the research
paper they conducted a study of 1509 Swedish men and women aged 20-60 yeas with
a follow-up period of four months, to find a relationship between physical
activity, self-reported URTI and stress. They used a Web-based questionnaire to
get facts about the participants’ initial disease status and lifestyle factors
at the start of the study, as well as follow-ups. The results of the study
showed that high levels of physical activity – for both men and women – were
associated with a reduced risk of contracting URTI, and stressed people
(especially men) benefit from more physical activity.
Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
Quantitative
methods offer a way to gather and process a larger quantity of data. Findings
in quantitative methods can be more generalized to a larger population and
direct comparisons can be made between two masses, as long as valid sampling,
significance and coding techniques has been used. They can produce
statistically reliable and generalizable results. On the other hand, they do
not give an in-depth analysis of a phenomenon.
As opposed to
quantitative methods, qualitative methods aim to gain a complete in-depth,
detailed description of a phenomenon. Since qualitative methods produces
information only on the specific cases studied and that the findings are not
evaluated to see if they are statistically significant or due to chance, their
findings cannot be extended to a wider population with the same degree of
certainty that quantitative methods can. General conclusions in qualitative
analysis are nothing more than hypotheses.
I think you summarized the quantitative and qualitative aspects well, however I would like to add my reflections on this. I believe that quantitative methods are more often used in relatively new research areas and qualitative methods are more often used in relatively established research areas. The relationship between them are that quantitative data creates a foundation on which you can create qualitative questions/data. Do you agree with me on this?
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