Theme 4 - Quantitative Research

Facebook and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Unintended Consequences

I chose the text "Facebook and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Unintended Consequences" from the journal of Computer-Mediated Communication with an impact factor of 2.019.

Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
The quantitative method used where an online survey (with additional qualitative interviews with 8 of the survey respondents). The online survey, or questionnaire, was answered by 119 collage students at a university in Midwestern United States. It was consisting of 36 multiple-choice questions about their basic habits on Facebook but also about what personal information they share on their profile including how they had set up their privacy settings and what benefits or risk they saw in usage of Facebook.

This method gives a very generalized view of the specific target group (in this case, under graduate collage students in the Midwestern United States). The limitations might be that you need to get very many respondents to be able to draw any conclusions, and you won't get the qualitative aspect of the questions.

What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?
They seemed to have a lot of questions in the questionnaire, and I know from our "kandidatexamensarbete" that it's really important to ask the right questions. I think it's easy to ask redundant questions that wont help you to your goal, but they seem to have had questions to answer their hypothesis! I wonder though if they used all of the questions asked or if they could have left some out...  

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

Methodological problems include concerns about reliability, validity and dependability of data, results, conclusions and generalizations in a research enterprise. I think this study is a quite generalize one and they get the answers they seem to be searching for and thus I think that there aren't any great problems. I think it's good that they are using both quantitative and qualitative methods in the study. If they should improve the quantitative method then they could have had more respondents and maybe only focus on a smaller target group in a specific age-range or so. 

Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

In the article "Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection" they used a quantitative web questionnaire with follow-up questionnaires sent out through e-mail. 

The benefits of this was that they could send it to a large number of people who could answer it fast and easily. The limitations is as I said earlier that you don't get the depth as you would with qualitative methods and some respondents might not understand all questions or answer them incorrectly. 

With this method they could come in contact with 5000 people at once, and of which 1111 had answered all of their questionnaires!

Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

The benefits are that you can get really deep answers from a fewer range of people, but it's often more time consuming with qualitative methods than quantitative. Qualitative methods might be harder to draw any general conclusions of compared to quantitative methods. 

PDF version: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01494.x/pdf 

HTML version: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01494.x/ 
Methodological issues: https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110310100631AAFNbNn