Pre Theme 4: Quantitative research

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?

I have chosen the article “A comparison study of user behavior on Facebook and Gmail” published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior with a impact factor of 2,694.

The article’s main focus is to investigate if and how Social Network Sites, SNS, and email activities are correlated. They limited the Social Network Sites to Facebook and the web-based email service to Gmail. Instead of only using surveys they decided to collect data about usage from the participants Facebook and Gmail account. This is a new method to me, I had never heard about an interface collecting data from a third party and making it accessable to the researcher. They managed to recruit 1015 participants living in the US. Each participant had to first answer an online survey with questions about their demographic and psychological information. Then the participants had to use a interface retrieving data from their Facebook and Gmail accounts. All participants had to participate only once. This a quantitative method of collecting data. The benefits to using a quantitative method like this is that you can quickly retrieve a lot of data and increase the potential of finding commune statistic. It shows a descriptive summarization of usage in this case. Although a limitation to this method is that we can not investigate the descriptive data further and getting answers on users own interpretations. In the paper they mention that this method can help reduce the amount of people being bias which is easily happened when using surveys. This was something I had not thought about before and agree with. As I agree I still feel that this method had some weakness affecting the result. The participant knew about the OAuth collecting their usage data since they had to create their own accounts and this could have affected the collection of data. But I think that they considered this being a fault and tried to minimize their data being wrong by comparing their data with comparing their results from the surveys to studies made before. It could have been prevented by not telling the participant that it was a SNS and a email service they were going to investigate. Also the number of participants is to little comparing to the total amount of Facebook and Gmail users, therefore it is hard to make a general assumption of all users by this data. This could have been prevented by limiting their field to maybe only one country.

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

Benefits of quantitative methods are:

• Easy and fast data collection.
• Being a numerical type of research it gives the benefits of being objective and not subjective when analyzing the data. 
• This method can provide statistics making the analysis of big amount of data easier.
• Possibility of being anonymous.

Limitations of quantitative methods are:

• Requires huge amount of data which also requires many participants. Finding enough participants can be problematic.
• Well thought and formed questions so it leaves no room for misinterpretation since the researcher have no possibility to clarify anything after for example the questionaries has been sent out.
• Expenses from surveys and limitations of distributing all papers. Could lead to limiting the distribution through online services.
• Participants being potential bias.

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

Benefits of qualitative methods are:

• Investigate deeper and more detailed in topics. Could also lead to new questions depending on the type of qualitative method where the participants or researcher is able to ask leading questions.
• Less number of participants, makes it also easier to find people. 
• The method is flexible since you can change and adapt to new information found through for example open interviews.
• Can give qualitative data about peoples interpretations and experiences.

Limitations of qualitative methods are:

• Can not make general assumption of a population or broader amount of people.
• Much depends on the researcher that is collecting the data. The person has to be careful on how it acts and phrases the questions. The researcher has to be able to be objective all the time.
• Participants willing to be anonymous can cause problems.