This
week was a super busy week for me as I was working with the student
fair for companies called Armada. This took up all of my time so I
haven't really had much thought for anything else. However i managed to
get away to go to the lecture by Martha Cleveland-Innes and listen to
what she had to say. It was interesting to have a lecture with someone
whom you've read an article from, and as she brought up things that were
in the paper it was easier to relate to what she was talking about.
What I got out of the lecture that exceeded the paper were mostly ideas
and methods about reliability and validity in research and how to
separate them to really understand if you got the results you think you
did. This
was however the only lecture of the week, and since we didn't have a
“normal” seminar I found that it felt quite one sided, and I would have
liked to get the discussion that we usually have on the seminars.
There
was also a lab about SPSS that i unfortunately didn't have time to go
and do, but apparently there was some technical errors so it didn't
sound like I missed much anyways. But I will try this out some other
days as there was a link uploaded with instructions of how to.
On
the topic of Quantitative vs Qualitative methods, we read two texts
that were about these two, and I found the “new” technique with mixed
method quite interesting and even thou its supposedly much harder to
work with and design, its something that I hopefully get to see or work
with in the near future as it would be very nice to get a first hand
experience with how it works.
How about looking into SPSS over the next few days and getting back to this briefly in a future posting. It is such a powerful software and I would not want you to miss out on it… :)
SvaraRaderaAll methods are quite hard to grasp. For example, at first it might seem easy to conduct interviews, but there are many different interview techniques that influence what kind of data you can collect. Many researchers have traditionally focused on either qualitative or quantitative methods. Being an expert on both is of of course challenging. That said, mixed methods have the potential to contribute with very interesting results, for example, by identifying statistical findings and then explaining these findings by conducting interviews or focus groups.
I share quite the same experience from this week, Armada has taken almost all of my time :) I do agree that a group discussion on a seminar could have improved the understanding of the content of Theme 3. It feels like one have only gained rather shallow knowledge of the concepts that were introduced during the week! But maybe it will all fall into place and a deep understanding of the topic will emerge after the next week's seminar? :-)
SvaraRadera