Theme 3, Reflections

What have I learnt?

The main thing I take away from this week is how quantitative methods provide support for arguments in research. Before I found it hard to relate quantitative studies to more intriguing research questions, and it often stopped at the frequency of som occurrence. The lecture brought up the examples of divorce statistics, and before I thought of quantitative methods as just counting the number of divorces, now I see that such data could be just a step in drawing up conclusions on why divorces occur, and that the data you collect is necessary to back those conclusions.

My understanding of the method used in the paper we read as preparation for this week grew after the lecture. Before I was unsure of the purpose of the paper, and how the method was developed, but now I think that I see how the results of the quantitative analysis are used to test the model of Community Inquiry that the paper presents. I also see how mixed methods should be thought of as answering research questions that can't be answered by either quantitative or qualitative methods. Before I saw mixed research as partitioning the research objective into one quantitative part and one qualitative part, but then it's probably better to do two separate experiments or surveys and present them independent of each other.  

The lab exercise did not give me that much. I learned how to use the software, but since it's seemed quite intuitive that wasn't something that I feel was the main thing to take away. Now I know know of the existence of the software, but there are probably other tools aswel, also the examples we did in the lab exercise could probably be done using a more general calculation software such as excel. As usual when using software or learning a programing language i feel that the main difficulty is not how to do something(that can be discovered through google or trial and error) but rather what to do. This of course would vary with the experiment or research one is doing, but I still feel like I'm missing some core understanding in how to use statistics in a meaningful way apart from just comparing frequencies. I do however take with me the books Ester Appelgren recommended  and I hope that they will be a good read before doing my Masters Thesis.