theme 4 -first post

For the first part I read Information, expression, participation: How involvement in user-generated content relates to democratic engagement among young people by Johan Östman.

1.     Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
For this study they use multiple-choice questions were the participants got to answer a couple of questions. The benefits of this is that it is easy for the participants and by having given answers this make the data you get easier to compile. This makes the result clear and easy to work with. The limitations is that by having already given answers there might not be any alternative that suits one person and therefore answers in a different way than he would have. Also you have know in advance what people are going to answer which can be hard to do.

2.     What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?
I think they did a good job of getting to know the target group and I think that is important epically if they intend to generalize the result in a bigger context.  

3.     Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?
I have read somewhere that you never should have a middle value if you wont an opinion since people then tend to go in de middle so you wont get a straight answer. One other thing that I am not sure they did was to test and try out the from, and to make sure that people can understand the questions, answers and how to answer before they did the actual study.  

Drumming in immersive virtual reality is a study about how people change their performances depending on how they appear. By changing the appearance with features that you might think is better for that particular task. This study compared if people played the drums differently depending on how they were dressed and skin tone. All the people that participated in the study ware of skin tone causation, and what they did were to play the drums and see their hands as the causation or as dark skinned. For the hands in the virtual reality were man hands but there was females in the study but this did not matter as much as you might have guessed.

By using a lot of equipment to gather the data from each session, they gathered information on how their upper buddy was moving and how they played the drums. The conclusion of this study was that yes people played the drums differently depending on how their appearance was. I thought this was an interesting study to read and it showed the use of this phenomena and what it can develop to. As they stated in the study there is a lot more to investigate, since there are so many different features that can matter to once appearance. But it was a good first study and I think that it kept the focus through out the paper, which I liked.

The benefits of doing a qualitative study is that the study really can focus on the aim of the study and dig in real deep. It is not just a lot of numbers and graphs, is more arguments and it can provide a deeper understanding on how and why. But the limitations are that you cannot generalise the result widely.

The benefits of doing a study with quantitative methods is it can be very clear and the result you get from it is strong since it has been proven many times. The limitations of this type of method is that you do not a result that can argue about how and why, it is more something that states what is and nothing more.

I would say that this study had little bit of both qualitative and quantitative methods.