Friday, 25 September 2015

Theme 4: Quantitative research

Paper “Effects of Interactive Sonification on Emotionally Expressive Walking Styles” published in “IEEE Transactions on Affective computing” journal with impact factor 2.68.

The paper is a research that contains two experiments. The first experiment is about emotional walking and how the audio feedback of the steps is affecting the performance of the walking. The participants have to walk with sad, happy, fear, aggressive, tender and natural emotion. Different footstep sound feedback was produced in case of metal, wood, gravel, snow ground materials. In the second one the participants were different and they were asked to recognize the most characteristics sounds that were performed it the first experiment.

The quantitative methods that are used in this paper are surveys and laboratory experiments.  The benefits of surveys are a lot. The data of the surveys are easy to collect, to be analyzed and to be compared. The participant can answer them quickly and easy. The limitation is that the participant cannot describe his experience the way he wants to. However, the participants could leave an open comment about their experience at the end of the questionnaire. Lab experiments provide to researchers perfect conditions to perform and record the experiments, also to use equipment and anything else needed. The experiments would be difficult to perform in real world and the final results could be wrong. Nevertheless, the equipment should well design in order not to distract or be inconvenient to the participant.

The researches wanted to know the level of individual awareness achieved after the end of each experiment, so the questionnaires in the end were necessary. A graphic representation with the answer of the surveys has been done. In the laboratory experiments a lot of technologies were used. The main equipment (active shoes) was created by the researchers according to the needs of the experiments. Participants also had to practice before the lab experiments and familiarize with the systems.

There were not methodological problems in the questionnaires. The questionnaires involved 3 parts, the participant had to answer all the question of each part, and then he was able to read and answer the questions of the next part. The open comments of the participants were interesting and several. As concerns the laboratory experiments, the active shoes that the participants wore, could be designed better, in order to be more convenient to the participant, when he performed the walking styles.

Reflections on Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality

Immersive virtual reality is about transporting people to virtual place, where they can not only “be there” but also “act there”. That is to say that they have a “presence” there, they can experience new things and take part in activities. Virtual body ownership illusions refer to the feeling to see your body in a virtual environment in a different body type and also have bodily sensations and notion that is directed by you. These two concepts were unknown to me. The differences between virtual reality and immersive virtual reality were clearer after I read the paper. It was very interesting to read and learn about virtual body ownership illusions and the results on humans’ behavior. The experiment shown that when people own a different body type tend to change their behavior according to that, despite any demographical characteristics. In other words by using the correct body type in the IVR we can direct how people we want to perform and behave. This can be used in a lot of different fields like education, psychotherapy and rehabilitation in order to help people perform better by seeing and using a specific body type in a specific virtual environment.

Quantitative methods
Benefits: data can be collected and analyzed quickly. When the data are numerical, the results are objective and cannot be misinterpreted. In addition, the results of a sample can be generalized to the entire population if the response rate is high enough. In the case of statistical methods, we can understand huge amount of data after the statistic analyze. Also, the results of the quantitative methods are reliable enough to help us direct our future plans.
Limitations: a study that uses this method is related to the people that take part. The participants have to be a lot, in order to have a big sample of the population, which also leads to a bigger cost of this method.

Qualitative methods
Benefits: we can explore a topic with more details. So it is offering richness and depth of understanding of a field. Also, provides insights into the setting of a problem, the generating ideas and the hypotheses for later quantitative research. The method is more flexible in time and place and has a smaller cost than the quantitative method, since there is no need to interact with a lot of people or recruit them.
Limitations: in process and metrics the method is essentially subjective. Also it is not possible to track the risks. Finally, the results cannot be generalized to entire population

1 comment:

  1. About your research paper, I would have liked to know if final questionnaires have been designed by quantitative or qualitative methods. In other words, it would be relevant to mention the questionnaire is made with "close question" or if there is a person in front of the participant trying to understand in details each of his/her answers. I think that the second option is more laborious but maybe more interesting in terms of people behaviors understanding.

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