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.

Theme 3

Mixed research and online learning. What’s the connection? When I read the article by Lowenthal, P. R. & Leech, N I don’t feel like they have connected the two subjects enough. It is interesting reading about what mixed research is and the good and the bad things about it, but I don’t feel like they say why it is needed especially in online learning. The only thing they say is that today it is a mono-method, and they want mixed research. It is though really interesting to read this article, because I think it shows pretty good how the world of research works. This is a way for them to enter their say into the debate about how to make the research about online learning better and trying to perform a paradigm-shift in the way research should be made. It is also a way for them do talk about the paradigm wars and propose a way to make peace in that war.

Mixed research is a very interesting way of research and personally I think it is a very good way. I think if it is used right it will be a good way to broaden your research and a good way to make sure that you cover your area of research even better.  There are though some obvious problems. Quantitative and qualitative research is like two different genres, and to combine them you’ll have to be able to use both. It is like the sport Nordic Combined when the athletes compete in both ski jumping and cross-country skiing in the same competition. It is not enough if you are the best in one of the sports, you have to be able to do well in both.

One interesting problem with mixed research is how you describe your methods use. Lowenthal, P. R. & Leech, N talks about this problem and how it may be hard to duplicate a mixed research work. But if you can use this method, it is good. But you get the hard part of both the quantitative method and the qualitative, so you must be careful when you choose.

“Emotions, then, are a double-edged sword that may help or hinder learning” is a great quote from the other article by Cleveland-Innes, M. & Campbell P that shows the essence of what this, according to me, quantitative research on online learning looks at. Would this research be better if it had used mixed research methods then? I actually don’t think so, because this article was successful showing that emotions is present in online learning and that it can be positive or negative. That short statement is the answer to a good quantitative question. A mixed research would have been bigger and more complex. Maybe it would have given more answers to question about how to use this knowledge that emotions exists, but now they propose this on future work.

What I have learned here is that mixed research can be used, but one should be very careful when using it, since there is a possibility that the research will be incomplete instead of better. It is easy to lose vital parts instead of finding new extra possibilities. And for us students, it can be interesting to use the mix, but we need to be good at both qualitative and quantitative research first, and then we can start to use sciences answer to Nordic combination.