Reference: Xenos, Sophia. and Ryan, Tracii. Who uses Facebook? An investigation into the relationship between the Big Five, shyness, narcissism, loneliness, and Facebook usage. Computers in Human Behavior Volume 27, issue 5. (2011): 1658–1664
1. Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
In the study they used a questionnaire and in total 1635 self-selected Internet users between the ages of 18 and 44 were chosen to answer the 124 questions. Out of these people there were 311 users who failed to complete the online questionnaire and therefore their information was removed from the study.
Limitation: hard to get deeper understanding of the users since it’s only a questionnaire, it’s difficult to follow up. There were quite a few people who failed to answer and that is another issue. Problems might appear in questionnaires if the users misunderstand questions or maybe answers in a way they think it’s correct.
Benefits: It’s an easy way to collect a large amount of data in a short time period. You can specify quite well what kind of answers you like and it’s easy to reach a lot of people in a larger geographical area than, for example, interviews.
2. What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?
I realized how difficult it could be to create a good questionnaire. Like I said earlier there were over 300 users who, for some reason, didn’t answer the questions correctly and it could be due to poorly written questions. You have to really think every question through so there are no misunderstandings and it’s easy to follow, especially if you have more than 100 questions like the scholars had in this study.
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?
The main problem of the study, and as the scholars mention in the discussion, is the approach they used to recruit participants for the questionnaire. Both Facebook users and nonusers were recruited through advertisement placed on six big Australian online discussion forums. Besides the ad in the forums they also posted an ad on Facebook with the aim to recruit Facebook users. Out of all the users answering the questionnaire, mainly of them were Facebook users. To get a more even distribution of Facebook users and nonusers the scholars should have used other methods to recruit users. I mean since the scholars wanted nonusers, the Internet might not be the ideal place to look. Instead “an analogue” method, like advertisement on message boards or in newspapers could have helped to recruit more nonusers since they might not use social media on the Internet as frequently. If the scholars had chosen another recruitment method they might have found more nonusers and thereby got a more even result.
About the paper by Olle Bälter and colleagues:
After reading the paper I
learned that high psychical activity could decrease the risk of URTI (Upper
Respiratory Tract Infection). The scholars in this study also used questionnaires,
which they sent out by traditional mail to potential participants in Sweden. I
found it interesting that their study showed a relation between highly stressed
men and high psychical activity and that this relation could decrease URTI but
the result wasn’t as clear with women.
4. Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?
The benefits of using qualitative methods, like interviews, are that you easily can explain of some question are unclear. You can follow up an answer and try to get a deeper understanding that might be more difficult by using quantitative methods. The limitations are the time and the number of participants. It takes more time to conduct interviews and it’s difficult to get a large amount of participants.
The benefits of using quantitative methods are, as I explained in the answers above, that it’s an effective way of collecting a large amount of data. It’s not as time consuming as interviews and it’s easy to keep statistics when you have certain questions with certain alternatives. The limitations are that misunderstanding might appear if the participants don’t understand how to correctly answer a question and this could lead to misleading answers.
5. Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?
Hi Marit, it would have been interesting to know what paper you read and what it was about :) Feels like it has something to do with Facebook? I agree with you that it is very difficult to create a good questionnaire. It's easy that you misinterpret the question or even don't understand it. I also think it is hard to choose what form the questions should be, open or maybe a scale with predefined answers. Do you select the first then people may not bother to write anything but if you select the other then the pre-determined answers might not describe the situation for the subject in the best possible way. I would really need a lesson in making good surveys i think because they are so handy to use.
SvaraRaderaHi Filip!
RaderaThank you for reminding me to write a short introduction to the paper, I totally forgot about it but have now updated that information, it has something to do with Facebook.
I agree with you that's difficult to know how to choose questions, how open they should be for the users to give their own input. In this particular case they asked questions about personality and I think that's complicated since you really want people honestly to answer questions about themselves. How do you really measure personality? It's hard to know how to interpret the results when you have personal questions about characteristics.
I agree with Filip that the knowledge of which paper you read would have given some context for better understanding at first. It is indeed hard to get people to actually answer the questionnaire. I believe that you often have to offer some kind of reward if you want to get good (or just many) answers. Sometimes when you hand out your questionnaire by e-mail it can get caught in the spam filter which is another problem.
SvaraRaderaOne thing I thought of was that qualitative methods are often used when quantitative results often already exists. The qualitative questions (via interviews as you speak of) can be more easily created when you have quantitative data on before hand. Do you agree?
Hi Carl!
RaderaAs I responded to Filip I have updated the information about the paper, but thank you for noticing me about the issue.
I agree with you that quantitative methods could be created easily when you have a quantitative result before. I believe that it is probably so because the quantitative methods could function as a means, or guideline, to create, for example, questionnaires. The quantitative method could give an implication of how people react to certain questions, and then you could adapt the qualitative method according to that information.
This leads me to a question.
Do you think that if you use a quantitative method before, that there's a risk of adapting the qualitative method to much according to the previous results, that you in the end risk loosing information in the quantitative study?