Theme 4: Quantitative research

1. Article: “Internet and Social Media Use as a Resource Among Homeless Youth”
Eric Rice, Anamika Barman-Adhikari (2013)Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12038/epdf

For this week I chose the article “Internet and Social Media Use as a Resource Among Homeless Youth” by Eric Rice and Anamika Barman-Adhikari. Here the authors have chosen a quantitative method to study how young homeless people between the ages 13-24 use internet in terms of communication, job application and house searching. The research includes 194 participants, all randomly recruited from a drop-in agency for homeless, who got to answer a survey consisting of various questions about their internet habits. The benefits of conducting a research like this could be that it generates data from many subjects in a short amount of time. Also, with a sufficient number and diversity of samples, it is possible to generalize which the authors seem to be aiming for.

The limitations with using a survey is that the participants may not be entirely truthful with the answers, especially when it’s a multiple-choice questionnaire which leaves little room for developed answers. As I understood it, there weren’t any options where the participants could evaluate themselves, which I think is a major error. This could be used as an alternative to personal interviews, which the authors stated were not possible since the youth’s were difficult to contact because of their living conditions. Furthermore, it would have been interesting to see if the results would differ depending on different regions, as opposed to just Hollywood where the research was conducted, but that’s just a personal opinion.

All in all, I found the research interesting and well thought through. The data was structured, where the authors have taken into account everything from ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and different kinds of living situations, since homelessness can be considered a diffuse term. The participants also received one 20$ gift card each for their cooperation, which was very thoughtful.


2. Article: “Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play”
Konstantina Kilteni, Ilias Bergstrom and Mel Slater
https://www.kth.se/social/files/56000bc9f2765448c25c5279/Drumming%20in%20Immersive%20Virtual%20Reality.pdf

In the article “Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play” by Konstantina Kilteni, Ilias Bergstrom and Mel Slater, it is discussed how body ownership illusions affects our behaviour. The research was done by letting 36 students play drums while wearing a head-mounted display and a motion capture suit, which created a virtual world with an avatar mimicking the movements of the real life player. The students were divided into two groups where each participant in one group got to play as a dark skinned, casually dressed male, while the other group was represented by a light skinned, formally dressed male.

The results were that the participants in the second group tended to “feel more expressive” than normal while playing the drums, as it matches the stereotype. As for the type of research, I would guess that it leans towards quantitative, as the test subjects were not handpicked, but recruited from a university campus. Furthermore, the research was done in a structured manner with a demonstration, the actual experiment followed by a questionnaire. Finally, the results were used as statistics based on all individual results, which is also typical for a quantitative method.


3. Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

As mentioned before, the benefits of using quantitative methods could be that with sufficient randomly picked samples, it is easier to generalize somewhat accurate in a shorter amount of time. This could also be something negative, but I think it all depends on the kind of research you’re doing. Another benefit is that by doing surveys, it could allow people to be anonymous and therefore answer otherwise uncomfortable questions.

4. Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

The benefits of using qualitative methods are that it allows you to be more deep and thorough in the research, as only a couple of handpicked subjects are chosen for a personal interview or an experiment. The limitations are that the results might not be applicable to a larger population.

The conclusion I draw from reading both articles and thinking about pros and cons with both quantitative and qualitative research, is that it’s probably best to mix the two. That is, to use quantitative methods to gather data and statistics in order to get a broad perspective, and to use qualitative methods to get more details.