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.

Theme 3 - Comments

Links to my comments on other students blogs:

1. alexisdm2572
2. theoryandmethodmediatechnology
3. stinazwahlen
4. dm2572rberggre
5. butlikewhyisit
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7. dm2572lisa
8. amlinden
9. fromplatotocasestudies
10. ixxzw

Pre Theme 5 - Design Research - Part 2

PART II

1. What is the 'empirical data' in these two papers?

Finding design qualities in a tangible programming space - Fernaeus & Tholander: Data collected from observing the children’s actions when using the prototype.  

Differentiated Driving Range - Lundström: Uses multiple methods such as conducting an state of the art analysis in the beginning, interviewing participants, analyzing blogs and forums.

2. Can practical design work in itself be considered a 'knowledge contribution'?

I think that practical design work can be considered as a knowledge contribution. The creators ideas are a part of the design and the design research could lead to further development through other researches. Making it a knowledge contribution.

3. Are there any differences in design intentions within a research project, compared to design in general?

When designing within a research project the method used is usually carefully chosen. Depending on the type of research you can also adapt your design intentions. It could be user centered meaning putting the user in focus when designing or self centered meaning putting yourself in the shoes of the user. I believe that this type of design and general design differ on this type of design being more focused on the functionality aspect of the design rather on mostly fulfilling a sensation as general design does.

4. Is research in tech domains such as these ever replicable? How may we account for aspects such as time/historical setting, skills of the designers, available tools, etc?

I believe it can be replicable. Although you have to take into account the researchers own knowledge on how a good objectified research is done. It also depends on the type of methods being used. I mean if the research is user centered then it can be replicable, but if the research is self centered that is not possible. And I believe this leads to further development of the tech domain.

5. Are there any important differences with design driven research compared to other research practices?

The design driven research is qualitative. It provides options of conducting the research through observations providing a deeper understanding and more accurate conclusions. This research also strives to make products as good as they could possibly be and focus is more on the functionality and testing. Meanwhile other research practice feels more about contributing with knowledge and information.

SOURCES:

Fernaeus, Y. & Tholander, J. (2006). Finding design qualities in a tangible programming space - Fernaeus & Tholander. Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University.

Lundström, A. (2014). Differentiated Driving Range - Lundström. Media Technology and Interaction Design. KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Pre Theme 5 - Design research - Part 1

PART I

1. How can media technologies be evaluated?

Media technology can be evaluated in different ways. I think that it’s important to take into account the type and purpose of the technology that you are going to evaluate. In the article by Réhman, Sun, Liu and Li they had a prototype which they evaluated through having user tests. They also focused on other aspects by having three keywords as a point of view; effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. It's a good way to evaluate media technologies, since the artifact rarely affects only one aspect of the user.

2. What role will prototypes play in research?

Prototypes have a big role in researches on new or developed media technologies. Prototypes have the advantages of giving the designer and developer a chance to try if their ideas are understood by the future users. It gives possibilities of detecting new errors or misinterpretations that can be later on fixed and prevented having in the final product. Prototypes could also open up to new idea. Sometimes products with an initial purpose could suddenly show that it can also have a new purpose for a user that wasn’t taken under consideration when designing.

3. Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?

Proof of concept is a demonstration through documented evidence to show that a potential product can be successful. This concept helps the developer to minimize the potential errors in the final product and lead to a difference maker for success or failure.

4. What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

Prototypes are samples of the final product, it’s not finished and can differ from the final product. Its characteristics are to give the users an idea of what it could be and how it could work to be able to try the product and evaluate it before final production. When making a prototype there are limitations such as expenses for materials or workers and time limits. In prototypes alternative materials can be used to lower expenses and when working on projects you often have time limits and can’t do everything you would like to make it perfect. This could affect users when testing the prototype and create limitations on their experience of the potential product.

5. How can design research be communicated/presented?

Design research can be presented by having data collected through e.g. questionnaires or interviews that are later on analyzed and summarized. You could also add visual explanations, such as images or videos, helping the readers understand. These types of methods can be very useful.

SOURCES: 
Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008). Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 10(6), 1022-1033

Theme 2 - Comments on other students blogs

Links to my comments on other students blog:

1. cloudsong223
2. theoatmeth
3. blog4course99
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Post Theme 3: Research and theory

The literature we had to read for these theme differed from the previous texts. I felt that these texts were much easier to understand because they were more based on facts than philosophical thoughts and reasoning. This gave me much more time on actually thinking about what I had read and the questions I had to answers.

The lecture with Leif D. started out good, with a clear definition of theory.

“A theory is a set of propositions that aims to identify (abstract) objects and their relation to each other.” -Leif Dahlberg

Especially this sentence confirmed my understanding of what theory is. I also felt that my understanding prior the lecture was confirmed during the lecture. One thing I didn’t really understand was the point of the question “What is man?”. We all gave a lot of answers to the question, such as culture, body, consciousness, feelings, and so on that we put up on the whiteboard. But I did not understand the purpose or felt that it was explained by the lecturer with a conclusion. Maybe it was just a way of making us give a set of propositions?

During the seminar my group discussed our chosen papers as a starter. It seemed that no one had difficulties understanding the task and questions. Most of us also felt that it was easier describing theory by what it is not rather than what it is. We agreed on everything and I felt that it was because of the texts being pretty straightforward that there were not that much room for open interpretations from these texts. One thing my group brought up, that I found to be interesting, was that the authors contradicted each other on one statement. In the text “What theory is not”, Sutton and Staw states:

“Diagrams or figures can be a valuable part of a research paper but also, by themselves, rarely constitute theory”

Meanwhile Gregor points out one of the categories of theory being Analysis. He explains it as a category analyzing what is. This theory analyzes data and diagrams which contradicts Sutton and Staws statement.  

Another debate during the seminar was what hypothesis is and how it differs from a theory. I felt that this discussion gave me a better explanation on what a hypothesis is. A hypothesis must be something you can reason around and argue about, if you can not do that then it is not a hypothesis. And a theory is built on a hypothesis that can be tested.

This theme was fun to read about, especially since I could relate to the keywords after having done my bachelor thesis. The assignment, lecture and seminar were mostly straightforward in my opinion.

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.