Theme 4: Quantitative research

Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?

The paper in question is "Connection strategies: Social capital implications of Facebook-enabled communication practices" by Nicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfield and Cliff Lampe from the Michigan State University, USA. Their main questions for the studies are to find out if "there are distinct patterns in communicational behaviors, which of these are more likely to predict bridging as well as bonding social capital". To achieve this, the authors first asked about the demographics as well as measuring the psychological well-being using some items from the Rosenberg self-esteem scale. They then proceeded with the actual questionnaire about the participants Facebook use. They used several questions following a 5-point agree/disagree Likert-Scale.

The benefit of using this kind of questionnaire is, that one ends up with a mathematically and statistically usable answer enabling the researcher to compare the answers better and to easier link them to for example the demographic characteristics of the interviewee and also being able to show them graphically. These methods however also limit the users in some ways as they somewhat may bias the outcome of the answer depending on the phrasing of the question. Moreover an interviewee may have more input than just the answer of the questionnaire and thus you may miss an upcoming trend which was not accounted for in the questionnaire.

The main issue I see in this paper is less with the way of questioning, but with the generation of the sample group as they are exclusively students. Moreover it is not clear how the they guarantee the randomness of the sample group. So improvement could be within enlarging or diversifying the sample group in order to also have non-students in the sample group as well as a more diversified age group as undergraduate students tend to be of a certain age range with very view exceptions.

Reflect on the key points and what you learnt by reading the text. Also, briefly discuss the questions below.
Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

Bergström and colleagues are analyzing how the behavior of people can be influenced depending on the virtual character that they are controlling within the immersive Virtual Reality. In particular people are put in an environment with a neutrally dressed asian virtual character that plays a base rhythm on a hand drum. The test person has to play the drum in any way he sees fit. First he plays it with only seeing a pair of neutral white hands without an attached body. After a certain time they switch to a body of either light skinned and formally dressed or dark skinned casually dressed type. Using upper body tracking they analyze how the different virtual character influences the behavior of the participant. They conclude that people controlling the dark-skinned casually dressed character changed they way used to play the drums in comparison to the neutral white situation whereas people controlling the light-skinned formally dressed character did not change the way they played the drums in comparison to the neutral white setup. While they discuss some of the other interpretations of their test, it would be interesting to see how a mainly dark-skinned instead of caucasian group would react to this experiment and if they would have the same behavioral change as the caucasian test group. Furthermore a setup where only the clothes of the people are changed would be of interest as one might argue, that it is the casual versus the formal dresscode that influences the behavior and not the skin color. Whether it is the latter one could be determined by setting up another test using a instrument that originated in caucasian regions.
The benefits of the quantitative methods are that one receives mathematically, statistically and graphically usable data that can be easily processed and interpreted. Furthermore relations between several of the factors in the quantitative questionnaire are more easily established. Qualitative research on the other hand can give more input about opinions and possible new trends that would otherwise in quantitative research go unnoticed as they have not been specifically asked for in the questionnaire.