Theme 4 - Reflection

 The theme in this week is mainly talked about quantitative methods and few qualitative methods for what is it and how to use it in our research. After done the courses in this week I felt that it is not difficult to understand than previous topics.  It is not has so many philosophy concepts that can occupied a lot of you time to understand them. I could say that since I have already had a fundamental understanding of these methods and also used them in my Bachelor thesis, I really did not think that I will obtained more knowledge from this week’s study before the courses start. Surprisingly, after the lecture and seminar I found that some of the concepts I learnt from the course gave me a new overview for the methods I understood before. Some of the concepts even gave me a good advice for my project from other course.

The most useful things I learnt from this week is how to design a questionnaire, a questionnaire is a simple and effective way can collect large of data in a short time period. We can control what type of data we want to obtain by designing questions related to our research purposes. When designing a questionnaire you should be sure that your questions can bring the exact information your desired. You should avoid ambiguity or knowledge questions cause you can not expect that all of the participants had more or less pre understanding for you research subject. Unless it is a Basic knowledge. You also need to pay attention that avoid given a “leading” question or any suggestibility that cause the participants followed you mind without the real thought they want to present.

It is also very important to test the questionnaire you designed before it could be considered “valid”. Is it contains everything you want to research? Does the question is difficult to understand which may make mistakes for respondents?  Was the layout of the questionnaire clear or can mobilize respondents enthusiasm?  A good questionnaire means that it be tested numerous and it does indeed answer the question that it was designed to answer. Perhaps, sometimes required to design many questionnaires with the same purpose but for different survey groups(e.g.  youth or old people). I think the knowledge I learnt from this course will give a great support for my project with other course in this period. I also need to design a questionnaire to assistance my subject but some problems confused me because I was not design it before. At now, I think I know how to solve them in a suitable manner.

In the seminar for our groups discussion, we are mainly talked about the benefits and the limitations for quantitative and qualitative methods, and how to use them in our research. We shared our previous papers and discussed why should we use the method in there. In the end we reached a consensus that how could we choice the methods we used in research is based on the different situations. In general, the quantitative methods provide an authenticity and systematic structure makes the results clearly and easily to start a statistics. However, when you need to obtain more detailed information or understanding in some specific field, the qualitative method shows more priority than quantitative method.