Theme 4: Quantitative Research

The paper I chose is called „The Social Media Basis of Youth Protest Behavior: The Case of Chile“ from Sebastián Valenzuela, Arturo Arriagada, and Andrés Scherman. It was published in the Journal of Communication in 2012. In this paper a research about the connection between social media usage and political protest behavior of individuals aged 18 – 29. The quantitative research method used was a survey that covered the following scales: Protest behavior, Facebook use, Grievances, Values, Resources, News media use. The data was collected in a face-to-face interview, what is not the very best method to collect survey data, but it was necessary to get something close to a representative sample. In the end they achieved a representative sample of 80%. In my opinion their strategy of analyzing the field and finding a mathematical procedure to receive a random representative sample was very well done. The most populated urban areas were chosen and proportionally to the size different communes the amount of samples from that area were chosen. In a further step the households with at least one 18 to 29 year old person, who were questioned were randomly chosen. This is a good way to get a representative sample, because if you‘d just share the survey online, the sample would just cover (1) the people that are online, (2) the people who are on the same platform as you, and (3) people who have some kind of link to you to be able to access the survey (school, university, specific discussion forums, etc). This excludes whole population groups. At the same time CATI (computer assisted telephone interviews) are not representative anymore, because especially the phone contacts to the target group of this survey are mostly not in good old telephone books anymore. To come back to the topic, the face-to-face interviews are having some disadvantages, but in this case it was the best method to use them. To mention some of the disadvantages of face-to-face interviews: The appearance of the interviewer can influence the answers of the participants highly. The participants could just feel uncomfortable of talking to someone they just met, what might lead to wrong answers. Especially social desirability comes often up in face-to-face interviews (although it occurs more often in interviews with open questions than closed ones that we had in this research). Social desirability means that participants answer questions according to what they believe they should answer in the society’s or interviewer’s opinion. A neutral background to the survey might lower this effect.

What made me think a little bit when I read through the paper were the measured scales. It wasn‘t clear for me where they were coming from or if the researchers just made them up. Further I wasn‘t sure if the Cronbach’s α values were coming from earlier researches where the scales might have been taken from or from a Pre-test (what was either not done or not mentioned as well).

In the paper „Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play“ from Konstantina Kilteni, Ilias Bergström, and Mel Slater was about the behavior of people in an immersive virtual reality. The in-between experiment focused on the reaction and change in behavior of Caucasians when their body in the virtual reality was changed to a casual dark-skinned or formal light-skinned. To read about this experiment was really interesting, especially the outcome that participants of both groups showed a strong body ownership illusion. I think this experiment is just a start in future researches about the influences of body ownership illusion in virtual realities on real life behavior. 

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

The benefits are to be able to reduce complex relationships between constructs to only a few statements. With quantitative methods you are able of making statements about a very big sample group. Results can be representative for a specific population or main unit.

Since quantitative research is always focused on proving hypotheses with the measurement of indicators and scales, it is a limitation that no new constructs or mediators can be found.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

The limitation of quantitative methods is on the other hand is the main benefit of qualitative methods. Especially in new or unknown research fields the method of just taking a look at a small sample gives the opportunity to find new constructs or mediators. On the other hand the outcomes on qualitative research can just be a implication of how it might look like on a bigger scale. To make representative statements qualitative results have to be verified quantitatively.

Sources:
Kilteni, K., Bergström, I., & Slater, M. (2013). Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 19 (4), pp. 597-605.
Valenzuela, S., Arriagada, A., & Scherman, A. (2012). The Social Media Basis of Youth Protest Behavior: The Case of Chile. Journal of Communication, 62, pp. 299-314.