I've chosen an article called The Benefits of Facebook "Friends": Social capital and College students use of online social network sites which was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.
- Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
The quantitative method used in this article was a survey. The survey was sent out to 800 random students at Michigan State University and there were 286 people who responded to the survey. The benefits of this survey is that the researcher reaches a quite significant number of Facebook users in a quite simple way (all they have to do is compose the survey and send out an e-mail). There is also a benefit in the fact that you can compare different groups of people within the study (e.g. boys and girls, frequent users and infrequent users etc.) and see if their results differ and then further analyze why you think it differs. The limitations is that the questions in the survey locks the participants in to certain answers, since the questions come with pre-written answers that the participants choose from. Depending on how you write the questions you might get different results in the study. - What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?
To be honest, not that much that I didn't already know. Since we conducted a quantitative method in our "kandidatexamensjobb" this spring I think this article was in a way quite similar to our study. Our study was about what makes college students click/ignore political content in their Facebook feeds and we also conducted a survey with a lot of pre-written answers to choose from. - Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?
One of the problems I think with this study is that they actually pay the participants (a small amount, but still) which could mean that they are participating for another reason than the study itself. And another thing, even though the question was about how college students could benefit their social capital from use of online social networks, I still think it would've been interesting to compare these users with the one's who's not using online social networks. In the survey there are 94% of the people who are using Facebook which means there aren't that many to compare the results to. But then again, this has nothing to do with their method, just their selection.
- Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?
One of the limitations of using quantitative methods is that you're highly dependent on how willing the participants is to actually fulfill the study. There is a high risk of people thinking "it doesn't matter if I drop out, there still lots of others participating in the study so I won't make a difference anyway". Another limitation would be that your results are highly dependent on the selection of people that chooses to participate in your study. Why did they choose to participate while the other did not? Does these reasons affect our results and would we've gotten a different result if the one's that choose not to participate would have participated instead? A benefit of the quantitative methods is that you get to look at your problem in a wider perspective than in a qualitative study, showing how a big group of people react to something instead of rather the individual. It's also of course quicker than a qualitative study. You can conduct a survey for instance which is quite quick and reaches lots of people. This on the other hand puts more pressure on the researchers since they have to be more careful about how they write their questions. - Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?
The most obvious limitation of a qualitative method would be the time aspect. It's usually more time consuming than a quantitative method. But on the other hand you get more individualized data that usually reflects the individuals actual thoughts on a study better than in a quantitative one.
Another limitation is that you're even more dependent on the people participating the study than in a quantitative one since the answers are much more individualized.
I think that one benefit with qualitative research is that you can get result that you weren't looking for. Since the qualitative method is more like a discussion between the researcher and the respondent, this will give the respondent a chance to speak more freely. I think you are touching this benefit when you say that you can "get more indivudalized data", but why I mean is that you can find data that isn't about the research subject, but it can still be helpful (for example by steering the research in a new path). Do you agree?
SvaraRadera