- Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
- What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?
- Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?
The research paper I’ve chosen for this week is “Measuring Mobile Phone Use: Self-report Versus Log Data” written by Jeffery Boase and Rich Ling. The research is about comparing two different quantitative methods for measuring how frequently the responders is using the mobile phone. 1382 respondent participated in the study.
The first method is a self-reporting questionnaire that the responders had to answer every day. The question was regarding how often the responders used their phone for calls and text messaging (SMS). They answered how much they thought they used it yesterday as well as the last week. The author compared those answers with log data from the nearest month that they got from the telephone company (that funded the research as well). With the help of some statistical calculation (which I don’t really understand) they got variables that they could compare with. The research questions that the author tried to answer was: How well do the self-report measures compare to sever log data? and What are the demographic characteristics associated with over- and underreporting of mobile phone use?
The main benefit using these methods is that you get a easy interpreted data about the research question, and by comparing these two methods you get it even more accurately. The only limitation I can see with these methods is that the self-report method might give inaccurate data, because people maybe find it hard to remember, for example, how often they used the phone yesterday or the last week. But this research paper is meant to examine that, whether it is a limitation or not. The other limitation with these methods is that you don’t know if it was the same person that used the phone all the time when you look at the data log.
It’s hard to say if I learned anything about quantitative methods when I read this paper. I guess the only thing I learned was the result of the research, that self-report measures generally do not compare favorably to log measures. The human factor is too strong.
The first problem with how the research used the methods is that the responders was only from Norwegian. If they were from different locations the result might have been different, perhaps other countries answer the questions more accurately in the self-report questionnaire. Another problem was that they got the log data only one time per month, which meant that they had to calculate the average use of phones per day in order to be able to compare with the self-report data. This might lead to uneven results. The reason that it’s hard to find problems might be that they only compare data between different methods, which is a quite simple procedure.
Olle Bälters text was about whether or not physical activity have any effect on upper respiratory tract infection (URTI). They used a quantitative method with 1509 participants. The results were that people that reported moderate to high physical activity had a lower risk of URTI. And highly stressed people, especially men, benefits more from the physical activities. I don’t know if I learned anything special after reading the text, more than the result which I already suspected.
- Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?
- Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?
Quantitative
The positive aspects of quantitative methods is that it gives a broad overview over the subject. The method gives statistical data which enables one to compare opinions between different groups and the data are easy to measure.
The negative aspects are that you only get answers to the questions that you ask and it can leave you without an view on why they answered like they did. It doesn’t give an in depth analysis over the subject. Quantitative methods can only detect patterns in the answer, not more than that.
Qualitative
Qualitative methods are the opposite of quantitative, it gives an in depth analysis of the subject and it enables you to understand patterns. When using a qualitative method you don’t have to follow a strict script, you can change the question over time to enable the respondent to give a good and deep answer.
The negative aspects are that qualitative methods are often used on a small group, and small groups can’t be seen as statically correct, you might get different answers if you use another set of responders.
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SvaraRaderaHi!
SvaraRaderaI think your chosen paper sounds very interesting, much because it is quite similar to my own bachelor thesis. Me and Charlotte Åbyhammar (who also takes this course) did a qualitative study where we logged some participants' smartphone use with the help of an application (App Usage Tracker). The application both showed how often they opened each application on their phone and how much time they spend on the apps.
I think it is good that the research you explain chose to have both log data and a self reporting questionnaire, because the fact that it is so difficult to estimate how much you actually have used your phone, show how addicted we are to our phones today. They are so integrated into our lives that we can't really tell how much we use them. In our bachelor thesis, me and Charlotte held interviews with the participants and we also asked them to try to estimate how much time they spend on their phone. To compare their answers with the log data was very interesting because many of them estimated way too low time.
We had some problems with the application that logged the participants mobile use in our research, but if the app would have performed faultless, I believe that this method is somewhat better than to gather log data from the telephone company as the researchers did in your chosen paper.