Theme #6 - post-reflections

Last week I picked a paper on crowd-funded journalism and what the types of articles wound up getting funding from its readers on the crowd-funded website spot.us. It turned out that articles in the area of public health and local city infra structure are most prone to getting funding. Today I attended the seminar on Quantitative research where we started off by discussing our selected papers. The students in my group agreed with me that the research the authors had conducted was indeed a qualitative research. Although they didn't think the method where they (in this case) had four participants who rated the journalists trustworthiness was that common.

During the seminar I also expressed my thoughts about researches in general tend to include both qualitative and quantitative methods since both methods can contribute positively. Most of the students in at the seminar agreed with me on that point. This makes me feel somewhat more confident that research papers aren't always that "black and white", what type of methods that are used in a specific paper depends highly on what questions you want to answer. In some smaller studies it can suffice to use only quantitative methods since the scope of the research is smaller. In a bigger more extensive research one might need to use several methods and combine them to achieve the best results (or at least "hoped" for results).

At the seminar we also talked a bit about what specific methods and their respective advantages and disadvantages. I think this part of the seminar was especially rewarding since I heard about a new type of qualitative methods: Narrative inquiries. One of the papers we ended up discussing more in-depth about was the paper Aikaterini had chosen where they looked at how women who had suffered from breast cancer had dealt with their decease, and more specifically how they used the internet to search for answers concerning their condition. The way they conducted the research was to make their 35 participants write down their experience post cancer (i.e. after they had undergone treatment successfully). So they basically answered questions regarding information seeking during their time of illness, with the opportunity to go more in-depth in describing their life at the time. This is what the method narrative inquiries is all about.
I believe this type of method is very effectful when you have "relatively" few participants in a study and you want to understand a situation with great detail. In this case with the women who suffered from breast cancer, you're able to get a really good look into a persons habits and feelings and you can then draw conclusions more easily since the possible "trends" between the participants are somewhat more clear (in my opinion). One of the disadvantages of using this method though is that the possibility of the feedback you get from an individual is highly specific to his/hers experience from a given event. In some cases when conducting this type of research you might find yourself with results where an individuals data can be hard to interpret and put into context (i.e. find some common patterns etc).

All in all, I think this seminar helped me to get a better grip on more unusual methods which can be used in conjunction with more traditional methods to achieve results with a greater depth.