Arozin - Quantitative research

Regarding: the chosen paper, what methods they used, their limitations and benefits, what I learnt from reading the paper and the main methodological problems of the study.

I chose the paper Measuring Mobile Phone use: Self-Report Versus log Data by Jeffrey Boase and Rich Ling (2013) from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication which has an impact factor of 1.778.

In this paper they use two different Quantitative methods, Self-Report and Log Data.

The main purpose of the Self-Report method is to let the research participants to log their mobile phone usage by themselves. In this particular research they measured two factors, frequency and duration. When it comes to frequency it specifies the number of text messages and phone calls that the respondent sent and received each day. When it comes to duration they asked the respondents to estimate the amount of time that they spend each day on using their device.  They crosschecked the results from the self reported data with log data acquired from four different phone operators, and estimated that the correlation between the self reported data and the billing data were moderately strong, they could therefore conclude that their self reported data were pretty accurate.

It must be considered that this study is mainly conducted on subjects residing in Norway, and it is possible that the behaviour of one specific demographic group cannot represent the behaviour of demographic groups in other countries.

Another problem is that the respondents may not be the only users of the phone, family and friends can also been using it, and their usage wont show in the subjects self report, but will be reflected in the log data collected which skews the results.

Another problem can be when it comes to self reporting of time, that the valuation may differ immensely, and won't be considered if u dont apply a statistical method that negates these effects.

In the paper there were three specific reasons to question the accuracy of the method: cognitive burden, social desirability and conceptual validity, which means that a respondent can subconsciously alter their behaviour when they try to recall it. That is if someone think they are a heavy or light mobile user, which will result in subjective answers, and the survey should therefore not include answers as “alot” or “moderate” but rather have time specific answers such as “two hours” or “five hours” to negate the subjective influence.

One way to solve the problems above can be to create a mobile application that logs the number of calls and their duration plus the number of texts and their sizees, and then sends the data to whoever makes the survey. This would make the data more accurate, but the problem with this method is the violation of the respondents integrity which should be overlooked before applying this kind of mobile application.

Quantitative methods are good when it comes down to measuring the general behaviour of a large demographic group. Its an effective way to collect data which u later on can analyse and draw different conclusions from, but you must always question the validity of its accuracy.

One effective way to evaluate the validity of data is to make a focus group that examines the data in a qualitative way.

Regarding: Physical activity, stress, and self-reported upper respiratory tract infection, and the benefits, limitations and contemplations of quantitative and qualitative methods.

The benefits of using a quantitative method is that the data collected can represent the demographic population which is surveyed with a fairly accurate conclusion. You will also acquire different significant data which you can use to contemplate relationships and correlations between different data categories.

Qualitative methods are rather used when it comes to acquire specific knowledge of a specific area, and when contemplating a specialist or specific persons on the subject who can give you specific information. The problem with qualitative methods is that it does not provide the information that quantitative method does, which is the amount of data acquired to draw an overall conclusions that may represent a large demographic group.

another difference between the two is that quantitative methods provides the information to draw your own conclusion, where a qualitative method presents an answer that may or may not be subjective. I believe that a surveyor should use both methods to an extent, they contemplate each other since one method provides the data which the other does not.

This study was a good example of the use and application of a quantitative method, even though the subject itself did not relate to a subject in media technology as much as it did on epidemiology, it still had a relatively large pool of respondents to illustrate the usage and effectiveness of quantitative methods.