The course began as a general and vague overview of a variety of topics and progressed to focus on more specific aspects of online communities. The study that I conducted worked to bring all of the different topics covered throughout the course together. I was able to apply much of the information covered in the course to my study to produce a more valid conclusion.
The "Research Methods" website was a very informative source. I was having trouble determining how I was going to conduct my research on the type and frequency of activity on Facebook by males and females. I utilized the concept mapping that I learned from the site to lay out my research question and the data that I would need to come to conclusions. I was first going to observe the activities of ten males and ten females and collect general activities that they participated in. Concept mapping made me realized that I needed to collect more specific data. I went back through and sub-categorized different types of interactions such as status comments. For these interactions I found that I had to qualitatively assess the types of updates and comments to determine if they represented and emotion or activity, a quote or were just random. This sub-categorization allowed me to draw further inferences such as the percent of total activity that was perceived as portraying an intimate interaction. The website also taught me that in order for the conclusions of my study to be valid I would need a larger sample size so I enlarged my study from ten to twenty-five of each gender in order to make my results more generalizable.
Readings that were provided in class provided a great deal of information that was useful for my study. "The Writing Lives of College Students" allowed me to infer that a small percentage of the participants may have been the producers of a large percent of the activity recorded. I also used the structure of provided readings to base the structure of my report off of. I found it interesting that I was excited to discuss the limitations of my study at the end of my report. The limitations of my study showed me how many different directions a study can go in. Although I was interested in the differences in activity between genders I found that my research and data collection methods did not allow me to determine whether or not a small percentage of users were responsible for a large percentage of the activity. Also, I thought it would be interesting if I would have been able to determine the correlation between the frequency of interaction between users offline and online interactions to see if users were more likely to interact on Facebook if they did not or were not able to interact frequently offline.
After collecting the observational data I found that it was lacking the qualitative data that would help me make conclusions from the observational data. I decided to randomly chose fifty users to send a questionnaire to. The questionnaire was designed to allow participants to provide information about their perceived value of the interactions that they participated in on Facebook. Although the response rate was very low, only receiving nine, it was very interesting and informative. I was able to conclude that picture sharing and commenting was perceived to be very valuable. Without the questionnaire the study would not have revealed that because I was unable to observe the users' activity unless they posted something that could be quantitatively annotated.
Conducting my own research raised as many questions as it answered for me. I was able to gain some insight into a question that I have wondered about for some time but it also led me to even more questions, as I stated earlier. I learned different methods and terminology relating to research that will and did help me articulate my research while the provided readings provided me with information and examples of how to display my findings.
No comments:
Post a Comment