After working with this theme and again making myself familiar with quantitative and qualitative research, I feel like I’ve gotten a deeper understanding of it. Quantitative data can be gathered in several different ways, for example, through surveys, experiments, or interviews. Quantitative methods seek to gather results in form of numbers or statistic, and deals with data that can be measured.
During the lecture llias explained the different steps he and his research partner had taken and the process before and after the experiment. For example, that the participants in the experiment were interviewed. The lecture also explained how to perform a quantitative research, formulating a hypothesis, test it, design experiment, collect data etc. Something I didn’t know before was about the questionnaire, for my bachelor’s thesis I didn’t gather information or data through quantitative data or questionnaires, so this was new to me. I learned that a questionnaire must be valid before usage, and that the questionnaire itself must have been tested by experiments, and that an already existing questionnaire can cost a lot of money! What I did know is that it’s very crucial that the questions are not angled or in any way colored by the researchers, and how important it is to actually ask the right questions.
Something that got me thinking was whether or not it was common for results to be modified by the researchers. Or whether or not it was common for tests to be modified to get the wanted results. My class mate told me about the sugar research done in the 60s by Harvard nutritionists, where the researchers had been paid to influence public understanding of sugar’s role in disease and protect sugar’s reputation in the public eye. I would at first think that this is very uncommon, and an extreme case, but I have to wonder, how common it actually is? I would think it’s very necessary to be able to fully follow the research process, and that all data is accounted for. Although if a research is based on questionnaires, and you answer anonymously, what’s to keep the researchers from filling in a couple of their own?
I found this week’s theme quite interesting, and as I’ve previously mostly worked with qualitative research, it was fun and very informative to learn more about quantitative methods.
Hi! I really enjoyed reading your insights for this theme. For me it was also interesting to receive all this information how a great research is conducted for real. I see research as an ice-berg. Usually when you read a research paper you see just the ice-berg that is up from the water, while many people forget that ice-berg's 90 % is actually underwater, in this case it is all the work defining hypothesis, then testing them, then making questionnaire, then testing questionnaire and so on. Even if research is conducted by quantitative method, it is never just pure data or pure statistics. Moreover, really interesting issue you arise at the ed of your reflection. I think there is always this gap for validity of data. This is why serious researchers prefer wide scope of data collection, so that they can make more general view of the theory they are testing.
ReplyDeleteThanks, great job!
I think forming questionnaires are often thought of as an easy task, just presenting some questions with related answers, but in the research field I think it’s really difficult due to all the things you have to think of when forming one. As you mention in your reflection, the questions should not be angled or leading and the questionnaire must be valid and thoroughly tested before usage, which puts quite a lot of demand on the person forming the questionnaire. From a business point of view, creating standard questionnaires and sell them is a really good business idea. Good job with your reflection!
ReplyDeleteSeems like a lot of us reflected on potentially skewed empirical results this week! Perhaps it is an expectation of quantitative methods being "solid" or waterproof that backfires. With our past themes awakening questions such as "what is knowledge?" and "is there ever an objective idea?", it is not hard to understand why we have become critical to hard facts.
ReplyDeleteThanks for an interesting read!
Hi,
ReplyDeleteInteresting story about the modified results on the sugar study. I can imagine that results are sometimes, somehow modified, even unconsciously. If e.g. questions are not formulated in a proper way, simple hints can get the study participants to answer in an a certain way. This might sometimes generate a result that was expected and sought for by the researcher, even if it's not correct. Also, as quantitative studies only generate hard data, a researcher has to add their own analysis to give the results any meaning. Even this process is likely to - unintentionally - modify the result depending on the researcher's intentions.
You make a good point about results being affected by modifications and I believe it is a rather big problem within research.
It would have improved on your reflection to include a contrast to what you already knew about qualitative methods and give some concrete examples.
ReplyDeleteThe questioning of a hidden agenda is useful though. This is true for many scenarios online, such businesses posting fake reviews on their own sites and bloggers that get bribed to write product reviews. Google started taking action against some of these techniques, but in the world of online marketing there are frequently new questionable techniques to promote certain websites to get higher visibility in search engines. These are called "grey hat" or "black hat" (when a technique is allowed, it's "white hat". Supposedly the same terminology could be applied to research methods to label what's allowed, questionable or disallowed.
Your discussion about how common it is for researchers to have a hidden agenda is so interesting! I think we should devote a full week just covering that theme. I usually look at the ”Acknowledgement” in the papers to see if the researchers have been sponsored or received funding by any organization in particular. Comparing research to media, and newspaper’s in particular. I have read that up to 80 percent of the content in the news derives from PR-agencies. Hence using the press to promote the ideas of their clients.
ReplyDeleteYou give a really good example when raising the question about the possible modification that can be done by researchers in an attempt to twist reality. It is something I did not really though about while going through the topics.
ReplyDeleteThis made me think about those researches that base their results using secondary data. Isn’t the objectivity relying mostly on primary data?
Due to the numerical data we gain from those methods, I think that it is still more about what they inform us about rather than contributing for certain decisions (like political ones for instance).
Thank you for the well-structured reflection!