During this weeks seminar we discussed qualitative vs quantitative with Olle Bältner.
We formed groups and discussed the advantages with qualitative methods vs quantitative. Here are some of the suggestions:
The advantages with qualitative methods:
- Deeper and more thorough analysis.
- Understand peoples thoughts and feelings - more factors that are being showed in the analysis
- More focus on understanding rather than facts
- Use different type of technologies to collect data such as audio recording, video recording etc.
Advantages with quantitative methods:
- Easy to visualize
- Easy to compare and compile
- Reproducible
- Easy to generalize
- Anonymous
Olle talked some about questionnaire construction.
- The trick is not to do it technically but to ask the questions.
- It is very important to test the questions before doing the survey.
- Test the survey !!
Always have an uneven amount of options so people can mark "middle" if they don't have an opinion.
Make a pilot test and let the participants think aloud while they are answering the survey.
Web vs Paper questionnaires
There are some disadvantages with web
- Uneven distribution, availability, technical issues, hard to read from screen, Layout cannot be controlled, higher initial cost, lower answer frequency
Advantage
- Low marginal cost
- Immediate digital storage
- Immediate evaluation of answers
- Logic reduces number of questions
What could be concluded from this is that it is really important to know what kind of results you want and what kind of questions you are going to ask before you decide what kind of method you are going to use.
We formed groups and discussed the advantages with qualitative methods vs quantitative. Here are some of the suggestions:
The advantages with qualitative methods:
- Deeper and more thorough analysis.
- Understand peoples thoughts and feelings - more factors that are being showed in the analysis
- More focus on understanding rather than facts
- Use different type of technologies to collect data such as audio recording, video recording etc.
Advantages with quantitative methods:
- Easy to visualize
- Easy to compare and compile
- Reproducible
- Easy to generalize
- Anonymous
Olle talked some about questionnaire construction.
- The trick is not to do it technically but to ask the questions.
- It is very important to test the questions before doing the survey.
- Test the survey !!
Always have an uneven amount of options so people can mark "middle" if they don't have an opinion.
Make a pilot test and let the participants think aloud while they are answering the survey.
Web vs Paper questionnaires
There are some disadvantages with web
- Uneven distribution, availability, technical issues, hard to read from screen, Layout cannot be controlled, higher initial cost, lower answer frequency
Advantage
- Low marginal cost
- Immediate digital storage
- Immediate evaluation of answers
- Logic reduces number of questions
What could be concluded from this is that it is really important to know what kind of results you want and what kind of questions you are going to ask before you decide what kind of method you are going to use.
Hi,
SvaraRaderaWow, you have a nice resume from the last workshop. I think I can get a lot of things that I miss on my notes when attending that workshop. Some of them I knew before the workshop, but only a few I know for qualitative method, because I believe it will be sought on theme 6, but I still find this workshop is interesting and very informative when explaining research method, questionnaire method and the differences between paper and web base questionnaire. If I can add something, one of the advantages of web questionnaire is capability to give the result of test immediately after completing the test. It can attract more respondent to finish the survey. Because, the respondent can get benefit directly from filling this questionnaire.
One thing that I tought about was that Olles' study in which he compared the rate of answers between web- and paper-based questionnaires was from 2005. So I think that there has been some development in how to distibute/design questionnaires in a better way now 10 years later. Also maybe the older generation is more comfortable with using the web now than 10 years ago, and more and more services are web based now. So do you still think that the answer rate can be 50/50 between both these forms?
SvaraRadera