Theme 4 (post)

Theme 4 reflection

This week we didn’t have a lecture on monday but a workshop/seminar on wednesday. But I think it went pretty well because it was like a lecture combined with some sort of a fun seminar. With fun I mean that we played a game that was successful.

I learned a few more pros and cons with quantitative and qualitative studies. It was interesting to hear how other group thought.

The difference between a paper survey and a web based survey was even more interesting. I didn’t think that the difference was that big and that the choice of the medium in which you uses has that kind of effect on, at the end, the answer that you get. The biggest benefit with using a web based questionnaire is that you can make it interactive (like the example that Olle showed) which makes the responders feel that they get something out of answering the questions. The most negative aspect of web based questionnaire is that you only reach out to an uneven distribution of respondents, you have to have access to a computer with internet and be able to use it in order to be able to answer. This removes some generations (maybe) from the potential responders. The answer frequency is much higher for paper based questionnaire.

Another interesting thing was that when you are creating a survey, you should use a middle-answer-alternative, otherwise people get upset that it doesn’t exist and can exit the survey. I thought that it was good to force people to make a choice and that it would make people to reflect, even if they didn’t want to.

One thing that Olle wanted us to remember was a step by step guide for quantitative studies:

-Invitation via paper letter

-Paper survey or url with password

-Remember via mail

-Remember via telephone

-Remember via paper mail