Quantitative Research Reflection
The researchers have a planning state just like most other workers. Selections of topics can be either personal, social, theoretical, or an ethical question.
The main question researchers are trying to primally answer in quantitative research: Why.
They are trying to answer:
- What exist/happens in society?
- Why does it exist/happen?
This is usually answered by using different methods. They collect data and test the hypothesis and theory with the data. The types of data collected are numbers and statistics. When testing the data collected, they do it based on precise measurements using structured and validated instruments. Differently from Qualitative Research, the researchers do not use themselves as the participant. The researchers are not known for the participants, which differ from Qualitative Research. The participant characteristics are hidden from the researcher. They are doing what they call a double blind studies.
Methods the researchers use to gather the data are: surveys, such as postal or e-mail questionnaire surveys, interviews- either face to face or over the phone. Others are observation, text analysis, statistical data and register data.
When studying the participants, those participants are a sample of the entire group. There might be an sampling error by the group being exceptional. This is why they do a random sampling, where they can estimate the error.
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