Reflection Theme 3

This week has been interesting. Quantitative methods are interesting and as a student you have to be able to master it. I think the hard and interesting thing about it is to find the correct sample size for your cause.  In the article about Mixed Research they use one source for all their information about sample size, namely Onwuegbuzie, A. J., & Leech, N. L. From these authors they have seven different books and articles about sample sizes and other info about how to research with qualitative, quantitative as well as mixed research methods. This is very good to know when it’s time for me to look at my methods in my master thesis this spring.

For quantitative research it is very important to know how you should make your polls, and even more important to be able to know how to use this data. Already after trying SPSS in the lab this week I’m sold. It’s the perfect way to present your data in an easy as well as complex way. To run frequencies in a easy and effective way is perfect. I think it is pretty hard to do this in excel but the cross-tabulate function in SPSS is easy. In the lab me and Jacob compared the two questions “Did you listen to radio yesterday(and for how long)” and “Did you read any special journal yesterday(and how many?)”. It isn’t perhaps the two most obvious questions to compare, but the point is that in just a minute we compared the answers of these two questions and got a nice diagram over the whole thing. I felt like Hans Rosling for a few seconds and I am sure that I’m going to use this tool in my master thesis.

Data mining and presentation is of course one thing, but the important thing is what conclusions you draw from it and where you go next. I think that I have learnt that after the nice presentation of my data I almost have a responsibility to make something out of it at make sure that the correct conclusions is made.