Theme 4: Quantitative research (before)

I selected the paper "Virtual Support Communities and psychological Well-Being: The Role of Optimistic and Pessimistic Social Comparison Strategies" which was written by Anika Batenburg and Enny Das. It was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication which has a two-year impact factor of 3.117 (Wiley Online Library).

• Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

With the study behind this paper, Batenburg and Das aimed at finding out how online support communities influence individual breast cancer patients' well-being. Therefore, they conducted an online survey which was distributed in Dutch breast cancer support forums in order to reach the relevant target group. Using an online survey is a very efficient method in terms of scalability. It can easily be distributed to a large amount of people and without geographic limitations. However, it is hard to limit access to an online survey and it might therefore be necessary to exclude some of the submitted answers from the research sample. I personally have made the experience that online surveys are one of the best quantitative research methods. As long as they are spread in the right context, they support the researcher because they are available to everybody at all times.

• What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?

I actually did not learn too much about quantitative methods from this paper because I already knew a lot about it. During my bachelor's degree I have had multiple courses dealing with different research methods and I have conducted several quantitative studies myself. 

However, I have never done a research with calculations as detailed as the ones in my paper. I had mainly used online survey tools or easier tests on SPSS, which is a statistical analysis software. 

• Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?

As mentioned above, online surveys have their benefits but also their negative aspects. This particular study provided the link to a survey in seven Dutch breast cancer support forums and asked members or readers of those forums to take part in the study. First, the survey identified if the participants really were breast cancer patients and which state of the disease they were in. The following questions mainly aimed at determining how active participants were in the support forums (time spent in the online communities, activity in the forum - reading/commenting/starting topics) and whether this influenced their emotional well-being in a positive or negative way. 

Even though the distribution via the breast cancer support groups was very convenient and also relevant to gather a sample for the study, I have difficulties to see it as really representative for this study. As forum activity and emotional well-being were the two important factors in this study, it would have helped the study's validity to include people from all activity levels. I would argue, however, that even though the results showed that not all participants were equally active, probably the more engaged ones would be the ones also clicking on the link to participate in the study. Furthermore, it was difficult to distinguish precisely what exactly caused a participant's well-being even though there were also questions on offline support from friends and family. A more long-term study (this study focused on a time period of four weeks), could have revealed attitudes before joining the online community and uses and gratification of the forum visits. 

General questions / Questions based on "Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play" by Konstantina Kilteni, Ilias Bergström and Mel Slater.

• Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

Quantitative methods help to test hypotheses with a large amount of people and, thus, data. The results of a quantitative study can usually be generalised as being valid for larger groups of people or even societies or countries. However, quantitative studies are most often limited in their explanation of the results and cannot explain why something is as it is (cf. Brosius, Koschel, Haas (2007). Methoden der empirischen Kommunikationsforschung). 

In the particular example of "Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play", the quantitative research proved that individuals took ownership of their virtual bodies. However, the sample of 36 participants might have been a bit too small to generalise the results, also because all of them were university students. 

• Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

In contrast to quantitative methods, qualitative research usually focuses on smaller samples of participants. Qualitative research is less strictly structured and can therefore adapt to individual participants in an interview, for example. In a detailed research, it can be a good solution to first conduct qualitative research to establish possible motivations and reasoning for a behaviour and then quantify these with the use of, for example, a quantitative questionnaire (cf. Brosius, Koschel, Haas (2007). Methoden der empirischen Kommunikationsforschung). That would have been a better approach to the study in the article I read about users of breast cancer forums. The virtual body study, on the other hand, only aimed at proving that individuals can identify themselves with their avatars and qualitative research would not have been a good choice for that.