Theme 4 after blog

This week I've learned a bit more about quantitative research. I felt I knew a lot about quantitative research since I read a lot on it when I wrote my bachelor thesis. And I got most of it confirmed before this theme. During the first seminar, we sat in small groups and discussed some of the papers that we had chosen. It was interesting to hear that we all selected papers from journals with high impact factors, but there was a lot of criticism of the papers, not too much positive. We discussed topics such as whether there were a large enough number of participants in the studies to draw conclusions. We talked about if we thought that the writers had used a broad enough target group for the kind of conclusions they wanted to make. There was also a paper that we discussed if it even had used a quantitative method or if it had used a mixed method. I believe we decided it had used a mixed method, which I learned this week, is preferable if you want to make reliable conclusions. After discussing all the papers we chose the paper we liked the most and drew a “figure” of it. We chose the paper ' Students Perceptions of E-Mail Interaction During Student - Professor Advising Sessions : The Pursuit of Interpersonal Goals ' by Taylor, M. Jowi , D. Schreier , H. & Bertelsen , D. 2011. The purpose of the paper was to find out whether students preferred contact and information via email or face-to-face communication. It was concluded that students preferred to have complex communication face-to-face with the teacher, and more specific information via email. The study was conducted on 300 students at the same college. We saw several limitations in the study due to the group of 300 people from the college. The first thing we discussed was that the survey was done in only one college, and since the experiences of email and face-to-face communication may be different in different schools it did not seem reasonable to draw general conclusions on 300 students in one school. The authors then attempted to draw conclusions regarding gender, age and race. There, we considered also that participation was a bit too low to be able to say that " 20 percent of black women prefer face to face communication with student advisors " , as the number of black women of 300 people is not likely to be enough to draw conclusions.

To sum up I think it was nice to discuss the texts within the small groups and talk about the pros and cons and how they could have done things differently in the different papers.