Theme 4 Pre Reflection

I picked the Journal-text:
The Benefits of Facebook ‘‘Friends:’’ Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites.

1. Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
A survey-quantitative method is used. They sent out a survey to 800 students of Michigan State University and they actually told them that they would give them 5 USD if they completed the

survey. They got a 35.8% response-rate which i would say is pretty good considering the way they went about everything. They sent out an email and asked students to participate. Looking to myself i would have to be honest and say that i would very rarely answer a survey that have been sent to my email. Regardless of the cons for me personally.


The limitations i believe are that they maybe could have reached out to more people by choosing another approach to the quantitative method. They've could have asked people on campus or something else. Sending out an email feels like the simplest way of going about!

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

I would actually say that i didn't really learn that much. In our bachelor-exam we conducted a similar approach and a similar method-choice. Our bachelor-exam was about politics on Facebook and we conducted similar types of methods but with fewer participants.

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

Well the first thing that i thought about in comparison to my own study, when i did my bachelor, was that the ones participating in this study did it by their own will. All the students in our bachelor were participating because our KTH-course told them too, it was mandatory for everybody, which meant we got like, 70 participants, but like 98% of the ones we asked.

Anyways, the participants in this study were paid a small amount to their "student account", 5 USD, but hopefully that did't matter to much. 

But on the other hand i would say that the payment could have been payed out afterwords after the survey was completed. Without knowing it from the beginning. Hopefully this would have resulted that fewer conducted the research but that these people were genuinely interested in the survey. 

1. Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

For it too be successful, large amount of data is necessary. If you manage to get a lot of data, that is positive but if you get few participants, it's not really quantitative.

One of the limitations of quantitative methods are that people could just rush through the method. "You are just searching and looking for data, 1 or 0, so here it is". A little bit like that. Another problem is that people tend to answer quick and swift instead of thoughtfully and thorough.But a positive thing about quantitative methods is that is perfect if you want to collect large amount of data for a thesis or if you want to conduct something that results in a somewhat general opinion, because you can ask so many people and the answers are often not so explanatory.

1. Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

The most positive benefit of a qualitative-method would have to be that you get very elaborate qualitative answers. In a quantitative method you tend to get the simple yes or no, answer or something that you easily can put into data and arrange in diagrams etc. But in a qualitative answer you tend to let people answer and elaborate what they mean and what they thought about when they wrote their answer. A whole another level of thoughts behind all the answers.


A limitation about this is that all the answers are derived to the person who answered so that means that it is very hard to draw a general opinion from a qualitative method. It is often more conducted to support a qualitative method of choice.