For this theme I chose the paper: Emotion regulation, procrastination, and watching cat videos online: Who watches Internet cats, why, and to what effect? from the journal: Computers in Human Behavior. As the title implies it is about finding out why there is such a big fuss about cats, who is watching them, and how it affects the individual.
- Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
The method used for this paper was an online questionnaire (spread through Facebook and Twitter) which took approximately ten minutes to fill in. The questions were about the individual himself and his association with cats, his behaviour, and then to what extent the subject viewed cats online. Almost 7000 users answered the questionnaire. The several benefits with this method that I can think of are: The ease distributing these surveys, with the possibility of an exponential growth of test subjects (through sharing with friends/family). Since it is online and within a friendly setting such as Facebook or twitter, the users might feel more inclined to answer truthfully as to uphold their secondary internet persona. Because it’s a short and simple test, it is easier to accept - ergo more people will take it.
Some limitations could be: It is harder to get a definitive answer when only asking and not studying the users up close while they perform said act of watching cats. While they might answer in a certain way, there is no evident proof that the user really is affected as he describes. Furthermore there might not be enough options in the answers to give of an accurate answer.
- What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?
I learned that quantitative methods are great for researching large groups of people, getting data that is easy to analyze and come to conclusions with. You can ask a broad range of questions that might correlate to one another, and then puzzle together which of them are truly connected, through statistical analysis. It is also easy to show for the reader, connecting the dots with numbers where quantitative analysis would have a hard time.
- Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?
I do not see any great problems with the study, they set out to find the truth about cats online and I think their method is appropriate for the job. There could be the fact that, since the participants taking the test are volunteering (not being randomly chosen) the demographic might become skewed - giving of a false representation of the love for cats online. They do not however want to find the ratio of cat lovers to indifferent people and thus volunteering could still work. Rephrasing the abstract to include this fact is appropriate, telling us that we are mostly dealing with the effects on people already with an affection for internet cats.
Short reflection of IEEE VR 2012 - Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality
This paper seems like a nice blend of qualitative and quantitative methods, going both into depth with exploring the subjects emotions and perception while also retaining mathematical analysis of numerical data. There is a lot of attention to details in this experiment, rapporting every single instrument and method used. I do find it fascinating how fast we adapt to living in another body and I wonder how this ties into historically determined and natural perception. The fact that people could sense that different bodies were better for specific jobs is really interesting, like being the embodiment of a samurai when learning to fight with a katana.
- Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?
The way you answer is often simplified for the statistical purposes (yes/no or checkboxes), therefore participating in such a study will not demand much of the participant. Quantitative methods are best used when you want to gather a lot of raw data. By nature it is numerical and therefore easier to measure and reach conclusions with.
- Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?
When you want to study something in depth, qualitative methods offer a more cohesive analysis of each test subject. It does create a greater strain on the researcher as the information gathered might be harder to analyse. It could also be harder to come up with a definitive answer as the data is often from a smaller selection of people and interpreted by the researcher himself. A lot more theory could be involved when deciphering the extracted data.
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