What I learned, week 49

Reflections on quantitative methods

From the paper I read for this week I learned that is important that the result is shown in a good and clear way, with good explanations. I think my paper had some mistakes, and even if it’s probably careless mistakes (like the sum in percentage for all men and women that was participated doesn’t sum up to 100%, but rather 98%) it lowers the credibility of the paper. It’s important to show a result that is correct, and don’t make any assumptions from the statistic, that the statistics doesn’t show (I don’t think my paper had this mistake). Like if a class get a lower grade in a specific course one year, we cannot say for sure that the student’s of that year was lazier than usually, the lower grade could also be thanks to the exam was harder than usual. It’s something impossible to know, by just looking on the student’s grades.

The seminar this week fun and it’s obtained a lot of good discussions. Sometimes it was problem in the discussions because it could be hard to discuss quantitative methods as a subject and make generalizations that holds for all quantitative methods, when a proposal of advantages came on something that only hold for some of the quantitative methods. Like if it’s cheaper, compared to qualitative methods or not. It’s hard to say, sense it’s depending on the exact method. But some conclusion could be made for all the quantitative methods, like it is a good way to obtain much data, easier to do on a big geometric area and it’s good for statistic analyzing etc. Compared o qualitative data.

Some methods can be doing on different ways, for example; a survey could be hand out by paper or by the web. Web-based surveys have some advantages and disadvantages compared to the paper-based surveys. It was advantages like it could faster be send for long distances, if it’s many participants (threshold about 3000 persons) it is cheaper, it could be logical and skip some unnecessary questions about smoking if someone already have pressed “no” for the question “do you smoke?” for example. It could also have other medias like video and audio as complement to the survey. Papers on the other hand don’t have the same risk for technological problems as the web has, and often also have a higher response frequency. We hand some discussion in the seminar on web contra paper on what was best for the environment, but don’t came up with a conclusion. I have to see some calculations to say what is the most suitable choice for the environment.

In the seminar we also discussed how important it is to test the questions if someone is going to create a questionnaire survey before handing it out to the target group. It could easily be wrong and it’s often difficult to make sure that the participants understand the questions in the right way. The leader of the seminar showed some questions that at first sight could look like good questions, but somehow easily could be understand on several ways. It was useful to see, and a good idea would be to read some more about questionnaire survey and how to test it before next time I do one.