Friday, 25 September 2015

Theme 4 pre-study

Select a media technology research paper that you argue is using quantitative methods in a good way. The paper should be of high quality. 
1.    Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
2.    What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?
3.    Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?

    The paper I choose in this theme is Internet and Social Media Use as a Resource Among Homeless Youth,  this is an exploration research to investigate how does the internet and social media used in those homeless youth, thus for that to find out and understanding how homeless youth use media networks bridging social capital and maintained social capital. The finding in this article will also be a resource to help those group.
    This research collecting data from a convenience sample of 194 homeless youth with the age is 13 to 24 for who used the internet before by using a quantitative method which is an internet questionnaire, for those subjects answering their self-information and use internet for what purposes. The benefits for that is make the results within an explicit form that can easily and clearly to see the findings and helpful for analyze. However, limitations also expressed for this method, cause the data in this research are self-reports so maybe the youth cannot represent their actual use of the internet. The data are drawn from a convenience sample, have a risk for biases in it. They are not collect data on the media literacy or media competence of subjects, they could not say if the youth really now that how to use the network to get what they need. They did not have detailed data considering special types they researched. Those all are problems easily appeared by using this method.
    I think the method the author used in this research is very suitable, a questionnaire can extensively and effectively collecting data in a short time. By designing the questions can control the direction we want to know. The statistical method can give an intuitive result make the researchers easier to find things they expected. For example in this article, the author give the question that what does the youth use the internet to do, he collect data and statistical results via a table form to show them, then we can easily find that homeless youth are more likely to use e-mail when connecting with others. Thus we analyze that they just try to hide their homelessness, then we think about how should we find a good way to help those youth without damage their hearts.
    I am not sure what is the main methodological problems in this article or in other words, I am not sure the means of it. In my opinions, they want to investigate how does the homeless youth use the internet and media to do, they give their hypothesis and test it with a questionnaire, and then discussion the result. However, we should considering more details when using a questionnaire to make results more representative.



Sources:
Eric Rice, Anamika Barman-Adhikari (2013)Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Read the following paper written by Ilias Bergström and colleagues. Reflect on the key points and what you learnt by reading the text.
    This paper suggest that a virtual body can substitutes the person’s real body in the visual term. There have 36 subjects be tested in a between-groups in IVR and represented with two models CD and FL in the experiment, the results shows that the subject feeling the virtual body in a virtual environment likes the real body themselves. This paper is very interesting cause I am very interested in virtual reality. But I have some questions that how does the author definition the two type CD and FL in this research, what will happened if use a yellow color skin? However, this research have a huge development prospects can extend to many fields and can be widely used and served for human society.

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

Quantitative methods is the use of statistics, mathematical or computational techniques and other methods to carry out systematic empirical study of social phenomena.

The benefits of quantitative methods:
Quantitative methods have more reliable and objective, it can use statistics to generalize results, users can easily change relationships between variables and can establish cause and effect in highly controlled circumstances, thus can reduce and restructure a complex problem.

Limitation:
Quantitative method does not study things in a natural setting, the main limitation is that a large sample should be studied in order to ensure the correctness and completeness. The larger the sample of subjects researched, the more statistically accurate the results will be.

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

Qualitative method is “a method of inquiry employed in many different academic disciplines, traditionally in the social sciences, but also in market research by the business sector and futher contexts including research and service demostrations by the non-profit sectors".

Benefits:
Qualitative method does not need a strict design plan before a research start, this make the research more freedom and unfold naturally. The researcher can get more detailed and rich data in a written descriptions or evidence.

Limitations:

It will easily gain biased view in the research and will heavily skewed data gathered. It also need to consume more time into it.


Sources: 

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