Theme 4: Quantitative methods

In the paper I read, Deviant Behavior in Computer-Mediated Communication: Development and Validation of a Measure of Cybersexual Harassment by Ritter, B. A. (2013) the quantitative method used is comprised by item generation, scale development & scale evaluation. The benefits are that a lot of questions can be generated and easily evaluated and used on a lot of people. The scale generated can be used to compare data easier. But a lot of detail is lost when using a quantitative method, since everything is reduced to numbers. There where a lot of steps to generate the items and later the scale, more than I thought.

Quantitative methods

When doing a quantitative research the method has to be very streamlined and there’s little space for answering the questions asked in a nuanced way. There´s also a risk that each participant interprets the questions in their own way, and their answer differs more or less than they should.

On the positive side, you could say that if there are enough participants these interpretations will be less likely to have an effect. Say half of the participants over exaggerate, and the other half understates their answers, then the those answers will cancel out each other, and the result will show a more balanced picture.

Qualitative methods

With a qualitative study you can get a more nuanced result, but it may be harder to decipher. The answers you get from the participants may be more truer (at least to them), but are harder to compare to the other participants. Also, since you don’t have as many participants, you may not get enough data for your research.

At the end of the day, there’s no answer to what method is best over all, but different methods can be better for particular studies, and the hard part is to decide what kind of method you should use for your research.