Discursive Equality and Everyday Talk Online: The Impact of ‘‘Superparticipants”
I chose a paper called Discursive Equality and Everyday Talk Online: The Impact of ‘‘Superparticipants” from the journal Computer-Mediated Communication which has an impact factor of 2.019. In this paper equality in online talk is discussed and “superparticipants” are observed in a forum. Superparticipants are a “dominant minority of poster”, which mean that even though they are few they post a lot of the content. In the forum that they researched they found that 0.4% of the posters were superparticipants and they stood for 47% of the posts. There is a negative view on superparticipants but, this study came to the conclusion that the majority of the superparticipants did not attack or try to stop other people from posting, on the contrary they had more positive roles.
The journal uses both qualitative and quantitative methods but I will only focus on the quantitative method. They used their quantitative method to gain an overview of the behaviour of superparticipants and did this by collecting data on the forum to show: average post per day, length of membership etc. The researchers collected the data from the superparticipants profile which showed information such as threads created and participated in (posts), thanked and thanks (for posts) etc.
The benefits of quantitative methods is getting a lot of data which can be generalised and compared while the limitation is not knowing the nature of these post or the meaning behind them - that is getting deeper knowledge. This leads to having a more of an analysing type of theory which only describes the subject and doesn’t really understand it.
The benefits of quantitative methods is getting a lot of data which can be generalised and compared while the limitation is not knowing the nature of these post or the meaning behind them - that is getting deeper knowledge. This leads to having a more of an analysing type of theory which only describes the subject and doesn’t really understand it.
I learned that quantitative data usually is represented by numbers and that it is fairly easy compare them. It is also very easy to visualise and convey quantitative data to readers, by for example using tables or graphs. It also shows the behaviour of a lot of a high participants therefor making it easier to draw some conclusions of superparticipants behaviour.
I believe that their way of collecting data was good since it did not invoke the active participation of the superparticipants (they were observed on the forum), in contrast with questionnaires where the participants need to answer questions which they can subjectively interpret.
This paper used both quantitative and qualitative methods and I noticed that if they only used quantitative data their results would have been very poor. It would only describe the superparticipants” behaviour by numbers but not really explaining why or how. It doesn’t give any deeper knowledge of the subject. Therefore I would say that for this paper a complementary qualitative method was truly needed.
Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection
Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?
Using quantitative methods, such as web-questionnaires which are used in “Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection”, have the benefits of being easy to spread and be answered by a high number of people. Questionnaires can often be easy and fast to answer, thus people may be more open to participate in studies which have questionnaires instead of interviews.
It is possible to draw more general conclusions from the result, when using a quantitative study, since there is often a larger number of participants (in comparison with participants for qualitative methods). The limitations is that it is difficult to get a deeper understanding of the study. As well as that the subjects may answer the questionnaire without fully understanding it or even when they misinterpret it. This is difficult to follow up or stop since there is no personal interaction with the participants.
Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?
The benefits of qualitative methods is that the researchers get a deeper understanding and get more details of the subject researched. However, qualitative methods (for example interviews) usually take more time than quantitative methods - and it is harder to compare and understand the results since the answers can differ vastly between participants (for quantitative methods numbers are usually the results as we can see in “Physical Activity, Stress, and Self-Reported Upper Respiratory Tract Infection”). Qualitative methods usually invokes less people because of this, and therefore it is difficult to say something general outside this specific group of participants.
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