During this week we read, discussed and reflected about quantitative research. The texts we read were all articles that used these methods in different ways and therefore we got a good glimpse on how the methods are used in reality. Both quantitative research methods and qualitative research methods are things I’ve used myself so I don’t feel that this weeks theme was something groundbreaking or completely new. I don’t feel like I’ve learned something new about qualitative or quantitative methods sadly since I already knew the definition of them and have experience with them. The definition that was used was that quantitative methods are methods where the data you aquire with the method can be calculated on with the purpose to find correlations between and within groups of subjects. In general the data often includes numbers and you can use statistical methods on the data.
I felt that the seminar this week wasn’t really that great. Maybe it was because both I and the majority of the group already knew and had used quantitative and qualitative methods themselves. This resulted in the discussions not being that interesting and it was mostly stating what we’ve used before and talking about what the best approach is during different researches. Examples of this is if you want to gather data from a lot of people about simple questions like yes and no questions quantitative methods are better and faster to use and this method might be the one that is usually used by us engineers. Qualitative research is more about why, how and under what circumstances something happens so it is a better fit for psychological research. I think it would’ve been better either if we had this course before we all used the methods or that we all could share what methods we’ve been using in our own work, why we used them and how it worked etc.
I do realize that some students hadn’t experience with this theme from earlier but since the majority actualyl had this I felt it was a bit lacking this week. Also it felt like the subjects discussion points wasn’t as deep as previous weeks so the discussions weren’t as long as the others which resulted in the seminar ending something like 30 min early.
As many others, you have found that it was hard to comment on this subject. But you raised some good points anyway regarding e.g. the defining use of statistical methods on quantitative research. It's an interesting distinction when you consider qualitative research, which we aren't as familiar with perhaps, and which usually doesn't really use statistics. Previous to the comparison of research methods this wouldn't have been evident to me at least.
SvaraRaderaHi Jonathan!
SvaraRaderaI like your critical reflection and think you make some valid points. The main highlight of this theme to me was reading the papers, both the one provided and the one I chose, I think these concepts are the most interesting when actually applied and research papers are almost always interesting to read! I hope you will find the future themes more interesting, good luck in the future themes!