Theme 4 - Quantitative research (1/2)

The paper I have chosen is called “FoodLog: Multimedia Tool for Healthcare Applications” and is published in MultiMedia, IEEE with an impact factor of 1.694. The paper studies the app FoodLog which is a multimedia tool for recording food and researches how users experience the app in terms of e.g. how fun the app is to use, how they use the app, how often they use it and if they will keep using the app after the study is completed. The goal of the user study was to see if the participants benefited from the app and service.

Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

The chosen quantitative method in the research paper is a questionnaire where the users answered several questions using a scale of 1-5 where one was negative and 5 was positive.

The paper also used statistics from the Food Log database to see what types of food people recorded and to collect nutrition data. The paper describes how they used statistics in this case but does not discuss this at depth and does not explain what method is used when analyzing this data.

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

Since I have already studied several courses within the topic of theory and method (where all courses had strong focus on the definition of qualitative and quantitative methods) I did not feel that this paper specifically affected my knowledge of quantitative methods. It did however serve as a reminder of the definition of quantitative methods.

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

The main methodological problem I see is that the method used when analyzing the FoodLog data is not stated. Instead, the paper only mentions a problem that arose in connection with the analysis and explains how they solved this. In order to enhance the replicability of the study the paper would need to state what method they used here and how they analyzed the data. In regards to the questionnaire, the study only used 18 participants and does not motivate how or why they arrived at this number. In order to get a result that is more generalizable I think that a larger number of participants should have been used.

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One of the keywords in the text “Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes he Way We Play” is “virtual body ownership illusions”. This term refers to the phenomenon when people are given the illusion that they exist through a different body, therefore losing sense of their own body. In this report, this is done through virtual reality where the participants play African drums and see, instead of their own hands, the hands of a Caucasian formally dressed male or a dark-skinned casually dressed male. The aim of the report was to see if a virtual body ownership illusion could affect people’s behavior and the results showed evidence that this is indeed possible. The report also argues that this type of illusion may have cognitive consequences.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

Quantitative research methods are used to understand a problem by transforming data into statistics. The method is used to quantify behaviors, attitudes and opinions from a sample group in order to generalize the results of a larger group. Benefits of the method is that it is based on facts and/or statistics and it can uncover patterns. The method is structured and can relatively easily include a large amount of people without the costs escalating in the same way as with qualitative methods. Limitations are that you cannot get a deeper view of the problem through the method, the data is at times not available, the method does not take the context of the data into consideration and the data may not be sufficient enough to explain complex situations.

Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

Qualitative research methods are used to gain a better understanding of a problem or situation. Benefits of the method is that you can gain insights and understand underlying problems, opinions, motivations and reasons behind e.g. actions. Benefits of the method is that you can get a deeper understanding of your research problem and there is room for both unstructured and semi-structured techniques which allows for a certain amount of flexibility within the data collection. Limitations are that the data is not generalizable, collection and analysis of data is expensive in terms of time and financial costs and the replicability is limited as the data and results are based on specific people in a specific time and space.