Pre-blogpost theme 4

Selected paper that use quantitative methods

To this week’s theme I chose the article Information, expression, participation: How involvement in user- generated content relates to democratic engagement among young people it is published in the journal New Media and Society (impact factor of 1.39 in 2012). The article is investigating if there exist a connection between UGC involvement and political engagement among Swedish adolescents aged 13-17 years. 

The method used includes mainly two different methods. First of all they are using Likert scales. The first one graded from 1 to 5 and the second 1 to 6. Likert scales is a way of quantifying data that are otherwise hard to analyze in a quantitative way. As an example of a Likert scale I take one used in the article. One question used was: ”How often do you use internet to do any of the following?” To get responses they used a Likert scale of 1 = Never, through 3 = A few times a week, to 5 = Daily. This is a way of quantify the data, however how should we do it? In the article they often present the mean value which might not be the best way because what is the mean of the options they have given? Even if we attach a statement to the value it doesn’t necessarily says anything about the distances between the options. 

They also grouped 7 questions together when it comes of measuring the political knowledge. Each individual question had only one right answer. They summed the total amount of correct answers for each participant and used is as a parameter to measure political knowledge. This way I think it as good methodology, however it would have been more accurate with more questions. 

When reading the paper I started to think of the difficulties that are embedded in the transition from a statement and the numerical analysis often made when doing a quantitative research. However I think it is a necessary transition because otherwise the data becomes hard to analyze. Another thing was the important aspect of the choice of participants to try to generalize to a level that makes the paper interesting. The article I chose had as much as 1812 participants however they were from a specific area which might have affected the outcome from the study.

Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality

This was an interesting article of how embodiment in Virtual Reality affect our behaviors. I think the study make use of both quantitative methods and qualitative ones. First of all the recording of sound and movements is quantitative data which are analyzed with numerical methods. Also at least some parts of the questionnaire was gathered quatitaive data, with the usage of Likert scales (questionnaires can also gather qualitative data with open answers). However the interviews used in the study is a qualitative method which can add another dimension to a study. I think in this study with a considerable small number of participants it was good to complement the quantitative result with qualitative data. In the interviews you can verify if the participants experience was similar to the measured quantitative data. 

Benefits and limitations of Quantitative and Qualitative data

First of all quantitative data have the benefit of being able to analysis through mathematical models. Which is hard to do with qualitative data. When gathering qualitative data we want to do it in a structured way that can be analyzed. In comparison when gathering qualitative data we want to get deeper into the participants own experiences, feelings etcetera. 

I would say that the biggest advantage of quantitative data comparing to qualitative data is the ability to have a bigger number of participants. It is hard in qualitative data because of the effort to analyze the less structured qualitative data is higher and therefore require a lot of time. 

Sources

Kilteni, K., Bergstrom, I., & Slater, M. (2013). Drumming in immersive virtual reality: the body shapes the way we play. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 19(4), 597–605. http://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2013.29

Maths and statistics support at University of St Andrews. (2015). Analysing Likert Scale/Type Data. Retrieved May 11, 2015, from https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/media/capod/students/mathssupport/Likert.pdf

Ostman, J. (2012). Information, expression, participation: How involvement in user- generated content relates to democratic engagement among young people. New Media & Society, 14(6), 1004–1021. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812438212