Part 1
1. Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
I
have chosen the paper "The association between having access to computers
and Internet and educational achievement for primary students in Brazil".
They examine if and how Internet access at home affects pupils educational
results.
They
used data from a survey of 7 million Brazilian 5th and 9th grade students. The
benefit of this method is quite obvious; the large amount of data. It would
have been impossible to conduct a qualitative research with 7 million
participants. The limitation of this method is that they only have numbers to
analyze. It would have been interesting if the students could have explained how
and why internet access at home affected their performance at school.
2. What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?
They used a third-party company's survey and
connected it with a record of school results. They didn’t conduct any own
survey, they just linked data and analyzed it. This is efficient and makes it
possible to get large amount of data.
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?
As I mentioned above, the authors didn’t conduct
the survey themselves. Therefore they had no option to customize to questions.
Part 2
1. Which are the benefits and
limitations of using quantitative methods?
The benefits of using a quantitative method are that you can collect large
amounts of data with relatively little effort. A quantitative method is clearly
structured and the result is possible to quantify, which generates an objective
research. Though, the result is mere numbers and it can be difficult to conduct
a deeper analyze.
2.Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?
The benefits of using a qualitative method are that it “measures” soft
values, stuff that cannot be displayed as numbers. This generates a subjective research.
A qualitative method is less structured than a quantitative; the results may be
very different between the participants. It is often harder to collect large amounts
of data, simply because a qualitative method is more time-consuming than a
quantitative.
Impressive amount of participants. Now we can really talk about quantitative surveys! This is a case in which research and survey questions really have to be well-written and double-checked in order to prevent misunderstandings. It is difficult otherwise to know whether a million people misunderstood the question. I suggest that you test such quantitative surveys with a couple of hundreds users first and make short interviews or qualitative surveys with them to see if there is anything with the larger survey question that seems unclear. I is interesting how the authors in this case chose an already performed survey and then interpreted it. How can they then be sure of how the original survey makers reasoned when constructing the survey items?
SvaraRadera