Theme 4 was about quantitative research and instead of having a seminar as usual, we had a workshop about quantitative research, in which we were playing a game. We divided the group to three different teams. Every team said so many things they could think about of a topic, and for every "unique" thing you came up with, you got i point. With "unique" a mean something that no other group said. It stimulated our creativity and we all came up with some very good aspects.
Enough about the game and more about what we discussed. Topics handled during the workshop was advantages and disadvantages with quantitative methods compared with qualitative. Some things we said was that with quantitative methods you get statistic data, you can do bigger surveys, easy to compare and follow up results, easy to visualize and to generalize. Things we said about qualitative where that you get more depth, good for explaining and investigating why etc. We then focused more about quantitative methods and surveys. The tricky thing in surveys is how to ask the questions and how important it is to test the questions. We got to see some examples of bad questioning. We also talked about how scale should look like, it's a good idea to have neutral options, because you sometimes don't want to take a standing. That's why grading scale surveys not should maintain even numbers of options. We played the game about pros and coins about paper vs web surveys. Paper is bad for the environment, more expensive, less effective to collect data for example. Web surveys is faster, cheaper and more environmental friendly (we discussed that if it really is so, and it depends of course), you can design it so everybody needs to answer all questions, interactive surveys, video/audio, easy to make international surveys (different languages) etc.. And some cons are for example technological problems, it can be hacked (safety) etc. We came up with a lot more...
We also get some golden rules how to gain responders. First the invitation, then send out the survey, and then reminders, reminders, reminders.
The workshop then ended with a cookie.
Enough about the game and more about what we discussed. Topics handled during the workshop was advantages and disadvantages with quantitative methods compared with qualitative. Some things we said was that with quantitative methods you get statistic data, you can do bigger surveys, easy to compare and follow up results, easy to visualize and to generalize. Things we said about qualitative where that you get more depth, good for explaining and investigating why etc. We then focused more about quantitative methods and surveys. The tricky thing in surveys is how to ask the questions and how important it is to test the questions. We got to see some examples of bad questioning. We also talked about how scale should look like, it's a good idea to have neutral options, because you sometimes don't want to take a standing. That's why grading scale surveys not should maintain even numbers of options. We played the game about pros and coins about paper vs web surveys. Paper is bad for the environment, more expensive, less effective to collect data for example. Web surveys is faster, cheaper and more environmental friendly (we discussed that if it really is so, and it depends of course), you can design it so everybody needs to answer all questions, interactive surveys, video/audio, easy to make international surveys (different languages) etc.. And some cons are for example technological problems, it can be hacked (safety) etc. We came up with a lot more...
We also get some golden rules how to gain responders. First the invitation, then send out the survey, and then reminders, reminders, reminders.
The workshop then ended with a cookie.
Hi,
SvaraRaderaA nice resume of seminar activity you have there. I agree with you that it is difficult to design the good question. However, a bad questionnaire will get a bad result which hard to analyze. When designing this questionnaire I think it is best to keep it simple and easy to understand to the participant, but I think it is easier to say than to do it Y[^_^]_ . Furthermore, I interested in the golden rule how to gain responders that you said in the last reflection. It is the part about the reminder, I only remember there are only 2 types of reminder, telephone and e-mail, so what is the last reminder it is physical mail or else ?