Reflections "after" / Theme 3

I must say that I have already had experience in working with both quantitative  (and SPSS-program in particular) and qualitative methods. Concerning quantitative methods, last year I was taking part in a mutual research “Public discussion and agenda-formation in Russia” of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and National Research Institute - Higher School of Economics, Russia. And what about qualitative method, I usually work with it when I’m writing my course-papers. But I must confess I have never deeply thought about advantages and disadvantages of this method and probability to combine qualitative and quantitative methods.

That’s why I find this week very fruitful – it gave me a lot of reflections on both methods and I got to know about a totally new and very promising method - mixed research.  During the lecture our main focus was on applying different kind of methods to online-learning - we have looked through different types of behavior in online-environment: social presence, teaching presence, cognitive presence. It turned out that gender makes no difference at all in the amount of activities. The lecturer told us that they used the approach of autoethnography that is creating research focus, documenting personal reflection data, self-observation data, personal memory data and comparing to external data. Now we are able to describe 5 characteristics of quantitative methods, explain rationale for choosing quantitative methods, outline the challenges of quantitative method. Also during the lecture we tried to answer the questions what are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge, what are its sources, what is its structure and what are its limits.

Unfortunately our SPSS-lab wasn’t very successful, because there was some kind of error in program, but I managed to practice at home. First of all, I defined a data set which contained several questions about the different platforms-usage for listening to radio. Hence, I conducted an overview analysis of the variables in the dataset.  

Then I run frequences and percentages in SPSS, by choosing a selection of variables and copied the tables from SPSS to Excel where I formed a bar-chart. The bar was presenting the total amount of people answering (100%) the people using it (90%) and the ones, who don't use pod radio (10%), displayed either wise in numbers or percentages. The final task was about crosstabs in the SPSS program – that are Suitable for occasional analysis of two or three variables; here I decided to choose web radio and pod radio as the variables – and it gave me the perfect overview of two variables at the same time.