Pre-seminar reflection 4

The article I’ve chosen is “Internet addiction in students: Prevalence and risk factors” (2013) authored by Daria J. Kuss, Mark D. Griffiths, Jens F. Binder from Journal of Computers in Human Behaviour (Impact factor: 2.489). The article investigates the newly arisen mental health issues related to internet usage amongst students and what it comes from. The article tries to, through a central quantitative method, decide how many - and what personality traits people have - that can be seen as addicted to the internet, and why this is.

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

The entire method is carried out using a questionnaire sent to thousands of students via mail (yielding data from 2257 of them), a method which is called cross-sectional online data gathering. The questionnaire was 120 questions on the subject, and took approximately 15 minutes to complete, including information on their age and gender.

The benefits from using this type of quantitative method is that it yields vasts amounts of quantitative data at the cost of virtually little to no expense for either the authors or the test-subjects. Thus, having it online and easily accessed probably lead to the authors receiving more data than if they had distributed papers. However, seeing as the study was to learn of students’ behaviour on the internet and thereby deduce whether or not they were addicted or not (based also on personality traits) a lot was asked from the test-subject. Potentially, studying a smaller amount of students’ through data gathering their daily habits instead of asking them questions on the subject could have yielded a narrower yet more precise result - since people often times might not reveal the entire picture when asked to explain habits of this sort.

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

Quantitative research and methods was already a concept I had come across (both in the bachelor’s thesis and other project courses) from having sent out google spreadsheets across Facebook and other social media platforms. However I had not yet come across the notion of cross-sectional online data gathering, even though the definition proved to be quite what I’ve always thought of an internet-based survey questionnaire: “A cross-sectional survey collects data to make inferences about a population of interest (universe) at one point in time”.

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

Apart from the fact I’ve already mentioned on the case of the questionnaire potentially, in this case, leading to other results than if they would have tracked the test-subjects’ internet usage, the authors themselves state a few limitations with their investigation. For instance, the results drawn from their method don’t take into consideration any culturally inherited behaviour - therefore the article’s result can not be implemented anywhere but specifically on english university students. Also, since their particular model didn’t suggest any differences between the genders, this discussion has also been overlooked - even though it might have an impact on other questions that those stated in their particular questionnaire. Furthermore, it would’ve been interesting to see a copy of the questionnaire to be able to criticize their method more in depth, unfortunately this was not provided.

Thoughts on the article “Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play”:

Before reading the article I had no idea that the effects IVR could have on a person could be so great. It is established in the article that through IVR, the user could potentially feel as if the body which they inhabit within the VR is at truth their own - with its social properties. However, I find it quite strange that the article doesn’t speak of how and why the authors have chosen to include the CD and the FL-bodies in any depth. It is as if they assume that everyone’s view of people with dark skin is that they’re better drummers than those with white skin - without stating that, and without discussing the consequences of performing an entire study based upon this prejudice.

1. Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

Quantitative methods usually contribute through the collection of vast amounts of data on a subject important to the research. The data is however often times of a lower quality than if one had gone for e.g. a qualitative approach instead. The statistical analysis which can be performed on quantitative results may yield data which opens up for evaluation and conclusion on certain subjects. It is best used when the method is used to collect a very pre-set number of variables, since the qualitative method yields focused and narrowed results on certain research questions. However, this means that the results are limited since responses are confined within a set framework. A notion which has proof in the article I’d chosen where the resulting questions gave the authors too little insight in gender and cultural differences for them to draw any conclusions on that particular subject.

2. Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

A qualitative method may yield more realistic results than a quantitative one, but it demands a lot more from the authors to be able to carry out the method, and to extrapolate the information which is useful to the investigation. For instance, having a qualitative method may use up more of the author’s time since some results may become redundant and irrelevant to the research - which then needs to be critically examined and potentially stripped off.