Theme 4 - Reflection

This past week I’ve learned a bit more about quantitative research methods. I read the paper Canadian university students in wireless classrooms: “What do they do on their laptops and does it really matter?" from the journal Computers & Education last week but since then I haven’t had the chance to go to the seminar nor the lecture this week. But this week I actually feel like I gained something from the readings and from reading the fellow classmates blog posts from both last week and this week.

I chose my paper last week because of my interest in e-learning and felt like I should take the opportunity to learn more about a subject I’m interested in and at the same time understand more about the research methods used in the paper. The paper made it a lot easier to understand how the chapter Methodology is supposed to be. I think that many of us before we start with the master thesis have an idea that this chapter is supposed to describe you have done to get to your results. And that’s true. It’s supposed to describe that. But what I haven’t reflected about before is that you should describe every single detail of the decisions you made on the road, and back it up with theory to make it valid. Another person should be able to copy your method and do it all over again and get the same results.

I see from my classmates’ blog posts that one of the topics at the seminar was the importance of testing a survey/questionnaire before sending it or handing it out to the participants. People often interpret the questions differently, and it is of great importance that no questions are written in a way that makes it as easy as possible for everyone to understand them. Short descriptions can help out throughout the questionnaire. By testing the questionnaire before, you can eliminate the risk of participants misunderstanding the questions. I remember when I handed out a questionnaire for my bachelor thesis at a university in Argentina, I realized that the students interpreted the whole survey different than the student at KTH (the same questionnaire for both universities). We did the test of the survey at KTH and not at the university in Argentina, so if I ever do a similar research I’ll remember to test the method in the actual context where it is supposed to be and not expect that it should be the same just because the groups of participants in the research are similar.

Another topic related to questionnaires that I could see was discussed during the seminar was if the questionnaire was printed and handed out, or sent to the participants by the web. There are a few pros and cons regarding the two ones, for example papers are platform independent but sometimes it can be hard to read the handwriting.