Post theme 4

Quantitative methods as a concept should be easier to understand than any of the other themes so far. Who haven't done some kind of data collection through questionnaires and similar some time in school. While the concept itself wasn't anything new, I still found it interesting to see how it is applied in research studies. I will not pretend that I understand all the math used while calculating the connections nor have I looked at it closer, but it made me think about the importance of identifying as many parameters as possible before you perform your test that can affect the result both directly and indirectly.

Something I found interesting however during the lecture was how much work is put into refining the questions through qualitative methods to look for any weaknesses in your test. All the iterations of pilot tests where you try to avoid bias, confusion etc. with evaluations before you believe you have a good test that hopefully will give you usable data.

With this in mind, I don't think any study related to human behavior can be done effectively with quantitative methods alone, even though the data gathering is. I got some flashbacks to Kant and his quote “perception without conception is blind” thinking you can't draw any conclusions and understand your data unless you know what you want to achieve and that your test actually answer that question in a good way.

In the seminar we talked about some strengths of quantitative methods, and what came up is the fact that you can reach a high statistical significance without having to spend as much time and resources compared to if the data collection was qualitative, much like I discussed in my pre theme post. The most interesting thing, that I didn't think about before the seminar that seems obvious after hearing it is the fact that you might not be able to get any interesting information from a quantitative study. Ilias used the example of a study on homeless people where doing a qualitative study where the researcher lived with them for a time was way better to understand the environment they live in and take part of all what I like to call silent knowledge.

I also see a weakness in only using quantitative methods when attempting innovation in e.g. design work. I can't see any way you could use quantitative methods to make e.g. the study on tangible user interface in connection to learning children programming like in the paper for theme 5. Observation of the behaviour of the subjects in the study gave more information than any questionnaire could, and similarly any attempt to measure input data would miss all the important contextual information that might be of even more importance.