Theme 4 - Pre Seminar

I have chosen to discuss the paper Information, expression, participation: How involvement in user-generated content relates to democratic engagement among young people, published in 2012 by Johan Östman in the journal New Media & Society which has an impact factor of 2.007.

1. Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

This paper uses a quantitative questionnaire. It contains multiple-choice questions where the researcher assigns numerical values to the answers in order to perform statistical calculations on the results.

For example the question: “How often do you watch the following types on programs on TV?” presents the participant with several types of programs where the response options for each ranged from: “Never” which is assigned the numerical value 1, through “A few times a week” = 3, to “Daily” = 5. This type of question was asked about various types of media use as well as similar ones regarding time spent on the Internet and political participation online and offline.

The questionnaire also contained factual questions about politics where a correct answer was assigned 1 and a false one 0.

The main benefit I can identify is that this method provides numerical data on which statistical measurements and calculations can be made in order to show its validity. It is to some extent also more objective than the closest alternative, which would be a qualitative questionnaire where participants are allowed to formulate their own free text answers to the questions. This type of questionnaire would require much more subjective analysis from the researcher, such as deciding which answers are relevant and how to link together the answers from different participants in order to observe patterns.

The main limitation is that while the analysis of the results may become more objective in a sense using quantitative questionnaires the questions are harder to formulate in order to account for all the variations the participants might answer. In this paper this could for example be in the question regarding user-generated content (UGC) participation; the researcher has decided to use these alternatives of UGC: “Produce videos”, “Publish own music or videos on e.g. MySpace, YouTube”, “Share music, film or video files” and “Write personal blog”. These are just a few activities among all the different variations of UGC available online, if the questionnaire instead had been based on free text answers there might have been more users answering that they take part in UGC.

2. What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?

In the Degree Project in Media Technology, First Cycle, me and my partner used both quantitative and qualitative questionnaires, so I did have some knowledge regarding this specific method. The part of the use of the method in this paper that I will mainly take with me would be the use of factual questions that could be right or wrong and assigning correct answers 1 and incorrect ones as 0 for statistical reasons. While this might be a bit obvious from programming where 1=True and 0=False I had not thought about it in a questionnaire situation before.

3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?

I believe the main methodological problem of this study is the lack of variation in the alternatives both in the types of media being used and the political activities offered as alternatives in the questionnaire. I believe the researcher could have provided a few more alternatives, such as sharing illustrations on DeviantArt, and still have kept the questionnaire qualitative. There could also have been some sort of qualitative method as a complement to the questionnaires.

Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality

This was a really interesting paper which feels very relevant considering the growth of VR technology. The result showing that body ownership illusion can be affected by the appearance of the body can surely be used in many interesting ways! I have myself tried a VR headset and played a game where the goal was to try and make me move my hands off a keyboard by having things happening to the VR hands; even though this game lacked the sensory parts I still did not manage to keep my own hands on the keyboard through the entire game but removed them reflectively when a knife fell down into the VR-hand. So I have experienced some sort of body ownership illusion myself and feel intrigued by the result of this study!

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative and qualitative methods respectively?

By using a qualitative method one can in many cases as previously mentioned obtain a wider, more detailed image of the subject in question. It also requires fewer participants since no statistics is being produced, but the lack of statistical data is also a limitation. It is also not possible to generalise results on a group outside of your participants.

Quantitative methods on the other hand has the great benefit of producing data which can be statistically examined and results can therefore be generalised on a larger group. It is also faster and easier to obtain more data through qualitative methods. As previously mentioned in more depth one of the largest limitations of qualitative data is that the result is limited to the specific data the researcher provide the participants with so to speak.

Östman, J. (2012). Information, expression, participation: How involvement in usergenerated content relates to democratic engagement among young people New Media & Society September 2012 vol. 14 no. 6 1004-1021

Kilteni, K., Bergstrom, I., & Slater, M. (2013). Drumming in immersive virtual reality: the body shapes the way we play. Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on, 19(4), 597-605.

http://www.ehow.co.uk/info_8179604_pros-cons-qualitative-quantitative-research.html [obtained on September 25]

https://www.researchoptimus.com/blog/qualitative-vs-quantitative-research/ [obtained on September 25]