Theme 4. Quantitative research

I have chosen to take a closer look at the article “From echo chamber to persuasive device? Rethinking the role of the Internet in campaigns” by Cristian Vaccari from the journal New Media & Society (IF: 1,824), published in the issue of February 2013.

The paper is questioning the claim most e-campaigning literature does; that Internet can’t change political attributes, just reinforce them. The author looks at how e-campaigns has changed through time, how people use political websites in taking in information and also if the people afterwards share or publish something connected to what they have read.

This he has investigated through the receive-accept-sample (RAS) theory. Which means that the viewer needs to receive the message and accept it to be able to change it’s own opinion.

I am a bit confused on what is a quantitative method and not. The definition of quantitative research is “The quantitative researcher asks a specific, narrow question and collects a sample of numerical data from participants to answer the question. The researcher analyzes the data with the help of statistics. The researcher is hoping the numbers will yield an unbiased result that can be generalized to some larger population.” This paper uses mainly two different methods in finding data. The author conduct 31 different interviews with people connected to different online political campaigns in the US. The author says that it was qualitative research but one could argue, based on the amount of interviews (31) and that the research area was quite narrow (responsible for e-campaigning in the biggest political parties in the US) that it was a quantitative method too. The interviews form the base of some of the statistics and numbers in the paper. This is why I’m not sure if this count as a quantitative method or not. But if it is, it is a good one since he got relevant data and statistics to his research and he enabled to connect the data to the theory.

The other method the author uses is collecting data from another research instance, summing it up and calculating some of the data making it comparable and usable with the data in the paper. I guess this does not count as a quantitative method since the author has not conducted the data gathering by himself. But he has on the other hand looked it up, transformed it and published it in a way making it relevant for his research.

The hardest part using quantitative methods is to know if the responders can represent the mass of the people the researcher want to have facts about. But the same problem one can have with qualitative methods since it is hard to know if the interviews will represent the people categorized in that group if the group is not very little.

In the paper named: “Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported

Upper Respiratory Tract Infection" it showed the importance of describing the method used when doing a quantitative method on who has taken part of the survey and answered the questions. It is hard to take all opinions into account when sorting out those who don’t have an email account and those who work in one place since they can’t send their replies in the questionnaire. In the specific research done in the paper the self-reporting of the URTI felt like a factor that could, if not done correctly determined for the respondent, be interpreted different depending on who answered. But the fact that they have taken all this measures to make the result as trustworthy as possible makes it a better quantitative research than it would have been not using or discussion those factors. Qualitative methods are good when it comes to information from people that might needs to be dug up. In interviews it is possible to get more precise information and one can use follow-up questions, which is not that often possible to do when using quantitative methods, especially if the respondents are anonymous.