Theme 4: Reflections after the Lecture and Seminar

This week’s theme was basically about the quantitative methods and questionnaires. For the theme preparation we had to choose a paper that is using quantitative methods and discuss about them. Also, we read IEEE VR 2012 - Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality by Ilias Bergström and reflect on the key points. I found this theme different and easier than the previous themes, since it is more practical and straight forward and it does not include any philosophical texts. 

Quantitative methods depend on numerical measurements. These data can be gathered by asking participants (questionnaires), by electronic equipment measuring or by observation under uncontrolled conditions.  Hypothesis testing experiment is about formulating a hypothesis, choose the part of population that you want to test it, design the experiment, analyze and get results. However, it is not sure that the results you will get are the results you wanted. In a controlled experiment there are two types of variables, the independent variables, which often answer the question “how many…” and the dependant variables.  An experiment will be more complex as the number of the variables increase, and we can formulate an argument after a series of tests.

Questionnaires are not used in the same way in all disciplines. For example psychology questionnaires could take years to be considered valid and a lot of revaluations are done during the design process. Some tips on how to create proper questionnaires are: we should not include knowledge questions, each question have to ask about one variable only, the order of the questions is crucial. Every questionnaire has to be tested and validate in order to be sure that people understand the questions and that we have include all the important aspects.

The study of Ilias is an example of a controlled experiment. The main question of the paper is if people behave differently under a body ownership illusion and if the body influences our attitudes and behaviors? The hypothesis was that the most appropriate culturally avatar will lead participants to perform better.  Demographic, personal characteristics and music skills data were collected by pre test questions. The experience of the experiment was recorded by post test questions. It is important to mention that data and graphs are not enough to represent the results. An argument has to be formulated to explain the data.

In the seminar we focused on quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative method is not always the best method. The method that we choose based on the field of the research. It depends on the context and the questions that we want to answer with our research. There are questions with qualitative and questions with quantitative need of answer. A combination of methods is better when we have both o types of questions. An interesting example is about a research for the political view of heavy metal music. If we choose to make a survey, the context will be reduced and we will lose the main reason of the study.

We also discussed about the objectivity of the data. Since we are making the surveys and we choose which data we want to collect, those data cannot be subjective. The answer to our questions was that objectivity is not the goal of the method. We care about the before and the after of the experiments. We want to know how people behave without be influenced and which are their subconscious reactions and what is their opinion. For instance, in Ilias study the participants didn’t know anything about the existence of a second body type, so that their performance will not be influenced. In other words the point is to try not to influence the participants before the experiment and as a result to not influence the data that we got.