Reflections on Theme 3 – Quantitative Methods

This week’s topic was about quantitative methods, more specifically what’s included within the concept and when to use it. We had a guest lecturer, Martha Cleveland-Innes, whom we also read an article by - “Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment”. Martha brought up some really good points about quantitative methods in her lecture, since she has a background as a quantitative researcher her insight into the method was highly defined and well grounded.

Some of the key points during her presentation were: when to use a quantitative method, what the difference is between using a quantitative and a qualitative method and what questions should be asked when deciding what method to use. She also discussed when to use a “mixed method” which was also the topic of our second article for the week - “Mixed Research and Online Learning: Strategies for Improvement”. Martha also pointed out that since we are now living in a technical and digitalized world with more and more data it’s even more important to look into different options of what method to use when doing research. Not only sticking to what’s most convenient for the researcher and what the researcher is used to but to be creative and come use methods that fits the purpose of the study.

She also talked about using deductive and inductive principles when approaching a research area. Often it’s common that people think that one or the other is the best principle but Martha argues that they are both important and that it’s actually an iterative process between the two principles. Deductive means that you start with a more general principle and then go towards more specific goals, whilst the inductive principles starts by looking at the specific details and then goes on towards a more general view. 

We also had a lab exercise with Ester Appelgren, unfortunately the software crashed a lot in the previous group so we never conducted the actual lab. We did however get an introduction of the software that we were suppose to use for analyzing quantitative datasets.