Theme 4: Quantitative research

Study of article
I chose an article written by Tracii Ryan and Sophia Xenos with the title 

”Who uses Facebook? An investigation into the relationship between the Big Five, shyness, narcissism, loneliness, and Facebook usage”. The article was published in the journal Computers in human Behavior in 2011.  The article aims to determine who uses Facebook, to carry out the study's goal the authors examined 1635 Internet users from Australia between 18-44 years old. From these 1635 persons 1324 completed the first questionnaire and the other 311 were removed from the study. The Authors decided that the participants needed to be between 18-44 years old to get an average of the Australian Facebook users.  Since Ryan and Xenos  tried to observe the Australian Facebook population by looking at a representative section of people I believe they did a cross-sectional study. This method is a good way to get a fairly good look at the big picture, the study is often cheap to proceed and can reach out to a large scale of persons. I also believe the study is using a Hypothetic-deductive method since the authors establish a hypothesis about who is using Facebook and who is not and then through a cross-sectional study try to determine whether their hypothesis is correct or not.

In this specific case the authors sent out questionnaires to reach the participants and to collect data. One of the study’s weak points is that Ryan and Xenox searched for people to take part in the report on the Internet and therefor most of the participants are regular Internet users and most of them (1158) are on Facebook. This could have effected the results in a different way than if they had advertised for participants offline and gotten an even dispersal between Facebook users and non-users. 
Sending out questionnaires is a great way to collect larger amounts of data but on the downside in a questionnaire you don’t get the opportunity to explain the questions further. Another negative thing is that the risk for misunderstanding is bigger in a questionnaire than in an verbal interview. 

I think Ryan and Xenos have considered the negative parts of their chosen method. I think it’s important that they evaluated and criticized their choice of methods and how they implemented them. I realized how vital it is to think through your decisions and the implications of your choices when writing a paper. If you do a really good job motivating and criticizing your methods I believe your articles credibility will increase.

Questions
The paper Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection aims to examine like the title suggests the relationship between physical Activity, self-reported URTI and stress. They establish that physical activity lead to a lower risk of URTI and that physical activity is more important to those with high stress levels.

1. A quantitative method is relatively cheap to use and in the same time reach out to a lot of people without being to time consuming. A quantitative method can be a good way to start your study and to figure out the most essential information about the target group.

2. A qualitative method is good to use when you want a deeper understanding for the target group since this method give the opportunity for the target group to interfere and share their opinions. For example in a design process the designer may believe that a certain function is the most important for the user when in fact the function is useless. In a case like this a qualitative methods opens up for discussion and a deeper understanding for the user can be developed.

References:

Ryan, T. & Xenos, S., 2011. Who uses Facebook? An investigation into the relationship between the Big Five, shyness, narcissism, loneliness, and Facebook usage. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(5), pp.1658–1664. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563211000379.