4. Quantitative Research pre-reflection

The research paper I have chosen for this week was published 2012 in the journal “Computers in Human Behavior” with an impact factor of 2.067. The paper by Reynol Junco titles: “Too much face and not enough books: The relationship between multiple indices of Facebook use and academic performance”. The purpose of the study was to examine if there is a relationship between the Facebook use of students and their college grade point average (GPA).

Quanitative method used:

The author used the quantitative method “Web-based questionnaire” in order to generate a large sample and make the paper comparable to prior studies. The survey was hosted on “SurveyMonkey.com” and sent via E-Mail to N=3866 US students where n = 1839 answered the questions, which is an uncommon high response rate of 48 %.

Benefits:

The main benefit of this method is that it provides a big amount of precise, quantitative, numerical data which is relatively quick and without any great effort collected while reaching a large sample. Furthermore, the data can be directly downloaded as an SPPS file which makes the analysis of the results less time consuming. As a last point, the results are comparable to other studies using the same study design or the study itself can be easily replicable.

Limitations:

The main limitation of this method is that expression of motives, views and opinions cannot be taken into account (or only limited). This is the reason why this method is mainly used to test hypothesis while it doesn’t facilitate the development of new theories or approaches to explain a phenomenon or generate in-depth information. Another limitation can occur due to the misuse of sampling or weighing, which can harm the validity and reliability of the research study. In this particular case, the study was conducted via the Internet and only students who had access to the Internet could participate as well as only Facebook user’s were taken into account. This might affect the validity of the study.

I learned:

While reading the paper I learned that quantitative research involves a lot of statistical knowledge in order to being able to interpret the results in the right way. It is not that easy to just think of a few questions and start an online survey. Many factors have to be taken into consideration while formulating the questions as well as which parameters and variables you want to measure. For the analysis of the data and to make the best use of it you need a basic knowledge of mathematics and programs such as SPSS.

Main methodological problems of the study:

With the provided data the author was able to find a correlation between the Facebook usage of students and the overall GPA. However, it was impossible to determine the direction of the effect. In the end the author was not able to state whether the Facebook usage caused a low GPA or students with a low GPA used Facebook more often. The quantitative method could have been improved by having a few questions on how the students think that Facebook effects their school achievement. It would be also possible to combine the quantitative method with a qualitative method and conduct in-depth-interviews to get behind their opinions, views and emotions to detect the real causes. Another problem is that the study was only conducted in the US and only via online, so that the cultural context and the accessibility of Internet limited the scope of the study. This could have been avoided by replicating the study in different countries, with a paper-based questionnaire allowing non-Facebook user’s to participate.

In the paper “Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection”, Lagerros et al. examined the relationship between physical activity and the upper respiratory tract infection (URTI). For their study the authors used a Web-based questionnaire which is an quantitative method.

Benefits and limitations of quantitative methods:

From reading the paper I could confirm my prior thoughts on the benefits and limitations of quantitative methods. The main benefit here was that they could test a hypothesis with statistical data and formulate if the result is statistically significant. In addition, they generated data which led to other assumptions about the phenomenon which they didn’t think of in the first place. On the other side, they needed a representative sample to generalize their findings, which involved a large amount of interviewees that had to be present during a specific period of time.

Benefits and limitations of qualitative methods:

In regard to this paper, qualitative methods can be used to analyze data from quantitative research. Apart from that, qualitative methods can give you a deeper insight and more detailed information about a specific topic or reveal new knowledge which can lead to formulate hypothesis. Its main limitation though, lies within its inability to make any generalizations because of its limited scope and sample.

References:

Junco, Reynol (2012): Too much face and not enough books: The relationship between multiple indices

of Facebook use and academic performance. Computers in Human Behavior. 28 (1), 187-198.

Fondell, E., Lagerros, Y. T., Sundberg, C. J., Lekander, M., Bälter, O., Rothman, K., & Bälter, K. (2010). Physical activity, stress, and self-reported upper respiratory tract infection. Med Sci Sports Exerc, 43(2), 272-279.