Theme 4: Quantitative research

That’s Not the Way It Is: How User-Generated Comments on the News Affect Perceived Media Bias

I chose the paper “That’s Not the Way It Is: How User-Generated Comments on the News Affect Perceived Media Bias” written by Eun-Ju Lee. In the paper, the author examines how comment made by other readers can affect one readers’ perceptions and their hostile media perception (HMP). Other researchers have found that user-generated comments do not only alter other readers’ perceptions but also their own opinion about the new issue.

As a quantitative method, Lee uses a web-based experiment with a total of 240 participants. An online survey company in South Korea recruited the participants. In the experiment, the participants were instructed to do the test in the environment and at the place that they felt the most comfortable. They then had to answer a set of question, in order for Lee to measure, among other things, their ego-involvement and their position on the issue. After that, an article was shown to them. Among with the article the participants were also shown comments. These comments both were and were not consistent with the opinion of the participant. To make the article as natural as possible, Lee chose to have an equal amount of arguments on each side of the issue. After reading the article and comments, the participants were asked to answer how well they agreed with a statement. Based on this, Lee could make conclusions that are presented in the paper, but I will not focus on them in this blog-post.

I will focus on the method that Lee chose to use. Since this is a study where a high number of participants are of importance to be able to make a relevant statistics and conclusions, an online experiment (as he refers to it in his text) is a good option. Lee chose to let a company find the participants for the survey. This method of finding participants have both pro’s and con’s. Since there was not much information about the company it is hard to say how they chose the participants for the survey. As always when people are involved in studies, the way of recruiting people might have an influence on the results.

By letting the people doing the experiment in an environment where they feel comfortable, it is more likely that the participants react as they normally would have. If the researcher choose to do the test in an environment that the participant is not use to, there is a big risk that it affects the result.

Testing the hypotheses on real people can be the most effective way to be proven right or wrong. It is a sufficient number of participants in the study to be able to make conclusions. But as I will mention later in this blog-post, quantitative studies generally provide the researcher with superficial information. In most cases it does not answer they question “why”.

Physical activity, stress, and self-reported upper respiratory tract infection.

Reading Olle Bälters text, I did learn about URTI system and what impact that different variables might have. But in this text I will focus more on the method that was used to collect data. I consider the key points in the text to be that: 

• It is important to to find more participants than actually are need for the study. Looking at figure 1 it is easy to see why this is. Of the 5000 that were offered to participate, 3195 did not even answer. 
• To be able to do more certain conclusions, it is important to have a large number or participants 
• Make sure to do the questioner accessible to as many as possible. In this study they chose to have a questioner online, that did not require that the participants downloaded any software nor install something on their computer.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

Quantitative methods, as the name implies, is to collect a big number of data. One benefits of this method it that it gives a lot of information regarding values and statistics.  One limitation of this method is that it usually only provides superficial answer and does consider the human perception.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

The method has the benefit that is usually provides a beeper understanding. It usually focuses on a sample of the population. A limitation is that assumptions cannot be made for the whole populations, since it is as a rule a smaller number of participants in this method.

For some studies, using both methods are advantageous