Theme 4: Quantitative Research - Reflection

For my part quantitative research began last week with the research paper Discursive Equality and Everyday Talk Online: The Impact of Super-participants. The paper was about “super-posters”: a small amount of people that contribute a lot in online forums etc. During their study they found that 0.4% of all members contributed to 47% of all posts (on moneysavingexpert.com). After having analyzed their collected data they could reject a popular opinion that super-posters often degrade other users and even trying to stop others from posting in the forums. Both of these phenomenon only consisted of a total of 3% and they found that super-posters generally have a positive role, answering questions and contribute to good and civilized discussions. However, I think that the amount of slander would be significantly higher if the study were executed on a forum like Flashback.

During the seminar we discussed the research paper “The effectiveness of Short Message Service for communication with concerns of privacy protection and conflict avoidance”. An example could be why people found it easier to be outspoken and truthful when communicating by SMS than face-to-face, like saying no to meeting up with a friend. They analyzed five variables: conflict avoidance, privacy protection, perceived ease of use, perceived effectiveness of SMS for communications, and subjective norm (influence of others towards one self’s behavior) to try to get a general conclusion of people’s attitude towards sending SMS. One thing I learned from this was the concept of “intervening variables”, in this case that the “conflict avoidance” and “privacy protection” variables contributed directly to the variable “perceived effectiveness”.

During the second seminar we played a game that was a bit like Boggle, but instead of trying to form words we were supposed to find for example advantages and disadvantages for qualitative and quantitative methods, and then in another round the same thing for online and traditional surveys. The game lead to some amusing – and at times pretty heated – discussions between the groups, and I think it’s good to discuss what you’ve learnt only using your memory, without looking everything up on the Internet every time you get a bit uncertain. I find this to be a problem pretty often, that when I’m in the middle of a story I realize that I’ve forgotten some significant parts of it and have to look them up on the Internet to get the story straight, which takes the edge out of the story and/or weakens the credibility of it.

Although I didn’t feel like a learned a lot of new things on any of this week’s seminars, I appreciated the part about surveys on the second seminar. One of the interesting (though pretty obvious if you think about it) parts was that you get a significantly higher completion rate if the survey gives something back to the one who’s filling it out. For example if your survey wants to find out the eating and exercise habits of a group of people, you could offer them a chart of their habits, what they should improve, and their BMI and so on in the end of the survey. Another thing that I appreciated in the survey part was, if possible, to avoid using terms like “bicycling” when trying to found out their daily exercise routines since “bicycling” has a wide spectrum in sense of exhaustion, since it can be everything from cycling in a walking pace to racing. In that survey they instead used statements like “as exhausting as sweeping the street” which most of us have a pretty similar picture of how much effort it takes. However, in my opinion this part wasn’t exactly ideal either since the most exhausting level was “doing work construction work” which in my opinion still is pretty abstract since it can be everything from working a jackhammer, to broom finishing the cement, to operating construction vehicles.

Even if it didn’t feel like I didn’t learn a lot at times, it’s still good to discuss topics to get another perspective from others and to keep you from getting a stagnated thought process and view on topics that aren’t carved in stone, which basically none are.