Theme 4: Quantitative Research

I have chosen the paper ” Internet and social media use as a Resource Among Homeless youth” by Rice and Barman-Adhikari. The method they have used is a computer-administrated quantitative survey, that lasted approximately 60 minutes. They had 201 homeless youth as participants that all received a $20 gift card. To prevent same youth to answer the survey several times, they had two research staff-members that was responsible for the recruitment. 

The limitation of collecting data from self-reports is that the participator might not be fully honset, and answer less seriously. If you want to collect data of how often people use a certain service or product, a diary or a more observational method might be better than using a survey, where you are able to follow up the participator under a loger time to collect the data. From the paper I have learned that the ”best” quantitative method might not fit every data you wish to collect. In this case, they had not the ability to follow the homeless youth, a survey according to them, was the best choice. 

When using a quantitative method you want the resulting data to be numbers or simple answers as age, sex, location, education, etc. The data should be easy to calculate and quantify, and are often presented as tables and graphs. That is what Rice and Barman-Adhikari have been doing, they have also been very good at criticized their own quantitative method. I believe that in their case, there will not be such improvements to make. Additionally they could have been using a qualitative interview to better understand how, why and in which way internet works as a resource for homeless youth, since they are still unsure how the usage of these technologies are working. 

By using a qualitative method you will dig deeper in the subject to get a better understanding. By using interviews you can find out emotions, feelings, opinions, but also answer the questions about how and why.  The limitations of using a qualitative method is that the data you get is not as straight forward as in a quantitative method. It is up to the researchers to value the data and interpret what it means, and what it contributes to the result. 

Rice, E., Barman-Adhikari, A. 2014. Internet and Social Media Use as a Resource Among Homeless Youth. Computer-Mediated Communication. Vol 19: 232-247. DOI: 10.1111/jcc4.12038