X-Mass Comm Shares Points With Individual Doing Thesis and Dissertation

A Role I love to participate in is allowing a candidate for a Master of Science Degree, or Doctor Of Philosophy, able to see the totality of research.

Once each of them sees, she or he can be wise in adding to the body of knowledge, particularly in Mass Communication.

Earlier I touched on, while in a discussion, definitions of terms, as entail in the title of a research.

Next, if a candidate does not know the research problem - not the problem of researching - others can easily tell the solution may be flawed.

Today, I did ask about the research methodology. Quantitative or Qualitative Method? Or what can be more a meaningful approach.

Qualitative and Quantitative research

There are numerous differences between qualitative and quantitative measurement.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research is research involving the use of structured questions where the response options have been predetermined and a large number of respondents is involved.

By definition, measurement must be objective, quantitative and statistically valid. Simply put, it’s about numbers, objective hard data.

The sample size for a survey is calculated by statisticians using formulas to determine how large a sample size will be needed from a given population in order to achieve findings with an acceptable degree of accuracy. Generally, researchers seek sample sizes which yield findings with at least 95% confidence interval (which means that if you repeat the survey 100 times, 95 times out of a hundred, you would get the same response) and plus/minus 5 percentage points margin error. Many surveys are designed to produce smaller margin of error.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative Research is collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data by observing what people do and say. Whereas, quantitative research refers to counts and measures of things, qualitative research refers to the meanings, concepts, definitions, characteristics, metaphors, symbols, and descriptions of things.

Qualitative research is much more subjective than quantitative research and uses very different methods of collecting information, mainly individual, in-depth interviews and focus groups. The nature of this type of research is exploratory and open-ended. Small numbers of people are interviewed in-depth and/or a relatively small number of focus groups are conducted.

Participants are asked to respond to general questions and the interviewer or group moderator probes and explores their responses to identify and define people’s perceptions, opinions and feelings about the topic or idea being discussed and to determine the degree of agreement that exists in the group. The quality of the finding from qualitative research is directly dependent upon the skills, experience and sensitive of the interviewer or group moderator.

More here for those who are interested.

http://uk.geocities.com/balihar_sanghera/ipsrmehrigiulqualitativequantitativeresearch.html

Enjoy!