Post - Theme 4: Quantitative research

The reading material for this theme was easy to read. Us being able to choose one of the papers on our own made a big different. I chose a paper that was interesting to read which made it more easy to understand and analyze. The paper by Ilias and colleagues was also easy to read and a good example of quantitative research.

Regarding the assignment for the pre post I felt that it could have been better organized. By starting with the first question you basically analyze the chosen paper with the knowledge that you already had from before. But if the assignment would have been to first reflect on advantages and disadvantages of quantitative methods I believe it would have given many better tools to reflect on the papers research methods. My advantage on this assignment was having done my bachelor thesis where we read a lot about different methods and how to analyze them and avoid common mistakes. I think that those who haven’t had any experience at all with quantitative and qualitative methods maybe would have gained by answering the latter questions first.

As said, I was already familiar with quantitative and qualitative methods so the pre assignment didn’t give me anything. During the seminar my group discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods. We agreed on the difference between them and it felt that we all had grasped the concepts pretty well. A qualitative method is used to achieve a deeper and broader understanding of something. The method could use methods such as conducting interviews with smaller groups. The goal is to understand and develop the knowledge towards the area. Qualitative methods provides the researcher a good opportunity to discover new areas they didn’t know existed. An example is by having an interview with open questions that may lead to the participant mentioning something that wasn’t even taken into consideration during the research. This type of method is more flexible. On the other hand quantitative methods are about numbers, statistic, large amount of data. We also discussed scenarios where these two are most efficient when combined. I brought up a scenario where you are researching an application. The app has a button and a swipe function for the exact same action and the researcher wants to investigate this. The researcher could then use a quantitative method to ask through e.g. a questionnaire how many that use the button function versus the swipe function. This would show which function that is the most popular. To further investigate the researcher would need to use a qualitative method to ask the users questions such as, "Why they prefer a certain type of function?", "What is the reason to one function being more popular than the other?".

Another thing that I found to be interesting during the seminar was the discussion if quantitative or qualitative methods could ever be objective or more objective than the other. The answer was that everything has an impact. Things such as the researcher's location, knowledge, choice of method, or formulation of questions to participants. Everything has been decided by the researcher and affected by something, therefor complete objectivity can never be achieved.